Recently, two pieces of news about lice have attracted people’s attention.
- The first is that a 7-year-old child washes his hair every day, However, there are still many lice on his head. Later, his parents carried out a high-temperature electric perm on his hair for half a month, and then wrapped it with alcohol and traditional Chinese medicine to cure it. The second is that a grandmother smeared some highly toxic pesticide on her head in order to treat lice on her head for her granddaughter, resulting in her granddaughter’s death.
The authenticity of the news needs to be verified, but lice may indeed grow on children, which is a problem that worries many parents.
Is lice what?
Lice are one of the most common ectoparasites. They mainly live in places where human hair is dense and clothes are wrinkled. They feed on human blood. Human beings not only provide them with living places and food, but also endure the threat of diseases they bring.
There are two kinds of lice parasitic on people, one is human head lice and the other is human lice, that is, pubic lice.
Pubic lice is special. It is parasitic near the reproductive organs of the human body, which is the “shameful part”. It is mainly transmitted through sexual behavior. The difference between human head lice and pubic lice is very small and is named after the parasitic part.
In the news, the lice on children should be human head lice. Their length is about 2.5 ~ 4mm. They like to parasitize people’s heads or other hairy parts and lay eggs at the root of the hair.
It only takes about 2-4 weeks for lice to develop from eggs to adults, then they mate and lay eggs, reproduce the next generation, and complete the life cycle in the same person.
The news is confusing, because lice are sensitive to temperature and humidity. When people sweat or their body temperature drops, lice will crawl away from their original parasitic places. Generally speaking, people who wash their hair frequently do not grow human head lice.
In addition to sucking human blood, lice can also spread some diseases under a few specific circumstances, such as epidemic typhus, relapsing fever and trench fever, causing high fever and general pain.
It takes patience to check lice.
Finding lice is actually a hard work and requires a lot of patience and energy.
Checking human lice requires turning the clothes outward and looking slowly from beginning to end along all seams and folds. If you see white or gray bugs crawling slowly on the clothes, nine times out of ten it is human lice.
However, the inspection of human head lice requires a perforated strainer, It is a kind of comb that is denser than ordinary comb. When it is suspected that there are lice on the head, the check method is to comb the hair with the comb first, and then use the perforated strainer to comb the hair layer by layer, so that the lice can be seen on the tooth surface of the perforated strainer. When using the perforated strainer, be careful not to let the lice fall into the hair or clothes again.
Two ways to prevent lice
1. For people who have not been infected with lice, prevention is actually very simple, as long as personal hygiene is maintained.
In detail, it is:
- Change clothes frequently; Change bedding frequently; Wash your hair and bathe frequently.
2. For families that have found lice, it is best for the whole family to carry out lice eradication work together.
Cook or iron clothes suspected of lice, while clothes that are not resistant to high temperature can be frozen in the freezer of the refrigerator for one night, which can generally eliminate lice.
How to eliminate lice?
If the method of “high temperature electric scalding plus alcohol mixed with traditional Chinese medicine” mentioned in the first news is used to kill lice, it is harmful to the scalp and is not beneficial, so it is not recommended.
What is more noteworthy is the method of [smearing pesticide] mentioned in the second news. This kind of folk prescription for lice treatment is unscientific, and it is easy to cause tragedy if you try at will.
In fact, spraying on the head or body with an anti-lice drug containing [permethrin] can have a good therapeutic effect. For some boys, they can even shave their heads and take a good bath to relieve lice troubles.