Is this the end of nit picking, awful smelling shampoos and combing hair with a fine tooth comb? If the results from this recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine about lice treatments prove accurate, then it just might be the case.
Oral Lice Treatment
In this study, researchers compared the effectiveness of an oral treatment of Ivermectin with a topical treatment of malathion lotion. This double-blind study was conducted over the course of 15 days and involved 812 patients.
The Ivermectin proved effective in ~95% of test subjects. The topical treatment was about 85% effective. So, maybe the oral treatment is the way to go (unless you are in the 5% of people where it didn’t work).
End of Nit Picking?
It would be nice if this meant that a simple oral treatment could replace the difficult and time consuming standard treatments for lice, but this one probably won’t. It is not 100% effective, not everyone can take the drug, and lice will certainly adapt. But if you’ve got a particularly difficult lice infestation to deal with, this could be the way to go.
Eradicate Lice forever?
Of course, there is a way that we could eradicate lice from the planet. Everyone, everywhere could shave their heads at the same time. That’s right, everyone shaves their heads bald. Without hair on which to live and reproduce, lice dies. It would be the end of lice infestations forever!!
Shaved Heads to cure a lousy world.
So who’s with me!?
Loading ...
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Well, I remember when I read Cold Sassy Tree when the one boy shaved his head to get a job because of lice, I asked my mom and she said lice can still be present even if you shave your head. (Don’t they live in body hair too? So you’d have to dip yourself in a bath of Nair to get rid of them all, right?)
When I was a kid every time there was a lice outbreak in school mom would mix up a bottle of 50% shampoo and 50% rubbing alcohol then make me stay in the shower washing and rewashing until all of that (about half a bottle full or a little less) was used up. I never had lice. Still haven’t. Though I was also on Septra DS back then and I know mosquitoes left me alone. So maybe that was the reason I never got lice.
Now one time, when my dog Audrey was alive, I was washing my hair and found I had picked up a couple of fleas. This was near the end of her life when fleas seemed even more attracted to her then ever despite anti-flea medicines and shampoos. Plus our neighbor refuses to spray his yard so even though we spray ours fleas were constantly showing up. (I’d hate to see how flea bitten his dogs are!) I was always bathing Audrey in a mix of water, rubbing alcohol, and white vinegar. Killed fleas instantly.
Lice are pretty tenacious but if they don’t have human hair on which to live and reproduce (body hair usually isn’t enough) they will die off.
Your neighbor just sounds rude. Never spraying for fleas! Geez.
What about extra hairy people like Robin Williams?
Is there a difference then between head lice and body lice?
And yes, he and all his friends are rude. One even purposely parked her car in front of our mailbox before going off to Hawaii for a week! And another parked her car right in front of our driveway, blocking it. That one we were able to get towed. (The one in front of the mailbox he had one more day before the city would tow it, and that was the same day he came back from Hawaii.)
Oh, and on the subject of fleas, I found myself wondering the other day how safe it would be for a human to use flea shampoo if they got fleas from their pets.
I’m curious… wouldn’t it be possible to get rid of lice by using diatomaceous earth? It seems that would be 100% effective, and I’d feel a little safer trying that than using ivermectin, which is the same poison found in ant killer (and I know that dosages matter in the use of ivermectin, and it’s supposedly “safe” to use in small amounts, but I still don’t think I’d feel comfortable feeding it to my children!)
I use DE on my cats for fleas, never thought about it for lice though (yeesh, I’m scratching just thinking about lice!). I refuse to spray my yard, too as I have a vegetable garden and chrysanthemums give me asthma – most pesticides are pyrethrum based. One neighbor refusing to spray doesn’t make the infestation – if you use chemicals in your yard, it should create a barrier.
As for taking ivermectin – lice will eventually develop a tolerance to it, too. They need blood, not hair to survive. They will just move on to other hairy animals, evolve into tick-like parasites or become like fleas and mosquitoes, able to suck, jump and or fly off quickly.
Nope. It never created a barrier. Even though it claimed it would. See, crazy California environmental laws – ones that are way too strict – limit the effectiveness of stuff like pesticides.
Our neighbor doesn’t have a garden, BTW. They’re just a bunch of partying 20 somethings. We had to constantly call the cops on them because of too loud music. They thought because my parents were old they didn’t deserve any respect and we have good reason to believe that they took steel wool to my dad’s car because it happened right after he wrote them a letter about how they needed to stop doing things like parking in front of our mailbox and park in front of their own house.
Hello there,
I’m thinking of shaving my head.I think this will help in lice treatment.
I have treated my hesd 6 times they still don’t die ,i even cut my hair to shoulder lenght….it was down past my butt!
I expect a lot more activity on this page now that the TSA is groping and fondling air travelers–including their scalp. Do they change gloves between pat-downs?