Head Lice: don’t let them breed in your hair

Head lice are parasitic bugs which flourish and survive in the hair. They feed on your dead scalp skin and may also chew on your live scalp. As a result you will experience a lot of scalp irritation and you may end up scratching your head. Now that is not just irritating and trouble some for you, but may also become a reason why people don’t feel like socializing with you.

How to prevent head lice

Once you’ve got head lice in your hair, it may not be easy to get rid of them, so prevention is the best strategy here. School going kids and babies are the most susceptible, because while playing, with other kids, they may make head to head contact with each other, making it easier for the head lice to travel from one head to the other. Also sharing clothing and personal grooming things causes of head lice to be transferred from one person to another.

In most cases, using other people’s hairbrushes and combs, helps the head lice to spread from one person to another.  Apart from these two things, you need to guard your towels, hats, pillows, bedding and clothing from being used by other people, especially when you know that they have head lice.

How to treat this problem

Most people believe that the problem of head lice occurs when you keep your hair dirty, but the actual fact is that head lice somehow prefers cleaner hair than dirty hair. Also, the popular belief that regular shampooing may be sufficient to get rid of head lice isn’t quite true and you need to adopt a two pronged approach if you want to get rid of this problem.

Firstly, you’ll need specially formulated shampoo and treatment, which needs to be applied to the hair on a weekly basis. And secondly you need to comb your hair after every treatment with a fine toothed comb so as to sweep out all the eggs that may still be present in the hair. Most of these readily available head lice treatments need to be carried out for a period of four to eight weeks, and only then can you be sure of having removed all the head lice and its eggs from your head.