Lice. Yuk.
 

So I've been the nurse at Scout camp several times and this last time, the director brought 2 girls in to be checked for lice. Now I've found a few on kids here and there but this child's hair was crawling with them. Ewwww! I honestly don't know how the parent could have missed this.

We have been "blessed" a couple of times over the years but we got rid of them fairly quickly because we had one of those Robicombs. Thank the Lord for them.

Anybody got any quick cures for lice in case I get stuck at camp without a Robicomb again? I'm not taking mine to camp!

Shaving off the hair. Or one of those shampoos. I remember a girl in my dance group had lice one year. It was getting close to our dance recital, so her mom just decided to shave the girls head enough to get the lice off and leave some hair.

LOL, I'll be jobless if I shave off somebody else's kid's hair! Which shampoos are good?

i saw a commercial for one the other day, i think it was called "Rid-X" or something like that

Not a "cure" but I think it would help to buy a really cheap set of bedding and one of those lice sprays for the mattress. That was, if a kid gets lice at camp, they can at least have a new set of sheets to sleep in that night. Lessens the "OMG SOMETHING IS LIVING ON MY SCALP" panic.

(Note: the above advice probably works best for body lice and college students, but hey, whatever works)

Spray the kid's head with raid and cover it with a shower cap. Leave it for about 20 minutes.








No, I'm just kidding!

Your post caught my eye because we had a recurrent lice problem in one of the classrooms in my school this year. All of the students would check out ok with the nurse, but then the little buggers would come back. (Our best guess was that someone was not fully disinfecting the home -- it is very time consuming.) Anyway, I have never heard of a Robicomb. What is it and how does it work?

It's this device that looks and sounds like an electric razor and has a very mild charge in it. You comb through the hair and it's buzzing and then when it comes to a louse, it electrocutes it but a human can't feel it. You have to stop and remove the louse and it starts up again.

We got ours at Eckerd.

2 home remedies that have always worked in my family (we call head lice "ukus" in Hawaii):

Listerine -- it kills the adults. Follow it up with mayonnaise/petroleum jelly. It'll treat the nits and also kill whatever remaining adults there are. Massage it into the head, and those things come off because it's too slippery for them to hang on. It'll work better with those special combs, though.

It's less toxic and smells better than the prescription stuff.

I have an easier solution.

Call the parents and have them pick their precious little snowflake up from camp. She can return when her family doctor faxes you a clean bill of delousing.

I read this article earlier this year. Never thought I would need the info.

http://blog.cleveland.com/health/200...in_dealer.html

For $65 an hour, he will get rid of your kid's lice - guaranteed.

Last week, Conroy opened Nitpickin in a quaint little storefront in downtown Willoughby.
He's pretty sure it's the only lice removal center in Ohio. He ought to know.

He started looking for one two years ago, when the critters took up residence on his daughter's scalp.
Conroy's search began after he tried three different over-the-counter treatments. Each time, he went through his daughter's hair with a fine-toothed comb - listening to her owwws and watching her cry until he was ready to tear his own hair out.
.................

I had lice when I was in kindergarten. We used Rid:

http://www.ridlice.com/index.html

I think it's the major lice/nit shampoo.

The important thing is no matter what you have to make sure you're treating/removing the nits as well the live lice.

The other important thing is to bag up stuffed animals and things like that for several months.

I say this, but I seem to remember hearing or reading somewhere that lice are becoming increasingly resistant to lice shampoos... eek!

Actually, speaking of this, I'm 90% sure the Girl Scout camp I went to for years and years and later worked at inspected every child's head for lice the day of arrival. If you had them, you were refunded and turned around.

My sister and I caught it from the neighbor kid when we were pretty young; but old enough to remember it. And, reading this thread makes me feel itchy all over. Ugh, my skin is crawling.

I learned that word the first week I lived there and right after that, met the priest's wife, whose name was Uhulani but for months I thought it was Ukulani and I couldn't figure out why she was "Heavenly Louse".:o

I hear they usually do this but these were 2 kids from the projects that they brought to keep them away from some sort of danger.

I can tell you what DOESN'T work - coating the hair with vaseline overnight. Thought I would NEVER get it out of Gypsyboot's long, thick hair when she brought them home from camp when she was 10.

It could be worse. My boy brought home 25 ticks in his hair from a camping trip two months ago. So much for letting his hair grow out to a corporate length. He was back to his military cut within an hour.

Gets home from the trip, hops in the shower, sits on my bed and says " hmmm, I think I have a tick because I feel something moving. Do you see any?!?" After demanding that he get off my bed immediately, we found more and more. Life Scouts are really proficient at that point in their BSA career to find little parasites on their body, but his hair was a great hiding place. This would be a weekend that GEN Alum was TDY so I am having to remind my 14 y.o. boy to check every nook and cranny and to shift things around to make sure no creatures were hiding. Very embarrassing for both of us.

Ugh! Parasites!

And speaking of Boy Scouts, I just remembered that at that Arrow of Light ceremony that we were discussing on the Eagle thread, one of the moms who's a juvenile court lawyer said that recently she went to the hair salon and the beautician started to comb her hair, then told her she couldn't do her hair. She bent over and whispered to her that she had lice.

If I ever have them, I don't want to hear it from a third party!

When I worked at a salon, we had that same situation. Everything had to be bleached down.

Oh no C! It's a shame you couldn't just buzz off their hair, because it would probably be a huge help with treatment. Are there laundry facilities where someone can wash everything they brought with them in hot water?

I would have paid good money for one of those Robicombs a few years back. The two older boys were both sick and then the youngest came downstairs around 11:30pm and said he couldn't sleep because his head itched too much. Yep, and he cried through the head shaving and start of the cleaning process. That got most of them, but of course I was up all night throwing away or bagging up EVERYTHING that we couldn't wash and doing laundry to the point of tears. The next morning we got the Rid stuff and did that.

Same son gets home from Boy Scout Camp this afternoon, and as he's older his hair has darkened quite a bit and it's a lot longer. I tried to get him to cut it before leaving but he refused. Wish me luck that there are no uninvited critters on that child, or he'll have a date with my clippers immediately!

Call your doctor and ask for the prescriptive strength lice shampoo. It is the only thing that would work when my daughter brought those nasty little bugs home from school. Yuck.

I have no experience with this, but saw it in my boy's salon - www.fairytaleshaircare.com

You all are dirty and need to take showers. Grossing me out ovah here.

^^^ Rudey!!! How are you doing??? :)




Does that listerine/mayo thing really work? Just wanna know?

And I love the sending the kid home comment, had me http://www.pledgepark.com/images/smilies/rotf.gif

Just so you know - lice actually prefer CLEAN hair - easier for them to lay their eggs on, apparently.

Mayo doesn't work. Never tried Listerine. The mayo does make the hair gorgeously shiny, however.

Hey baby, how YOU doing?

And swtxbelle, I never had lice nor have I known anyone with lice...fleas...or other infestations. That is straight up disgusting. I still recommend showering.

I recommend showering, too. Just understand it will do no good in preventing or displacing lice.

How true is this, really? 'Cause, back in my day, it was always the dirty-ass kids who smelled like pee and dirty underwear who got lice. To be fair, there were other non-dirty kids who got it, but they were the exception, not the norm. They probably got it from sharing combs with the dirty kids.

http://kidshealth.org/parent/infecti...mmon/lice.html
(Look at the prevention section)


It may be that in your experience the "dirty-ass kids" got them the most - but what happened is probably the "non-dirty kids" parents (being more responsible) actually did the proper treatment and follow-up, while the parents of the "d-a" kids did not, and so they had them longer, or were re-infested.

Lice are spread through direct contact or through sharing things like bruses. Dirt isn't an issue in infection.