To think they should bring back nit nurses?

[Rachtoteach]

First day back after half term yesterday. A nice, lice free half-term I should add. Doing my little girl's hair for school this morn, she is caked in nits and eggs. I couldn't send her into school - how could I when it would then have just spread and I would have been as bad as the mums I moan about who dont appear to give a toss. I had to take my son in anyway so went into talk to my daughter's teacher. I expressed my upset that it has now come to the point (headlice has been going on and on and on since Sept) that I have felt the need to keep her off school. I know its not the teachers fault. She said unfortunately some parents simply dont treat/check and until whole class is treated at same time, problem will continue. So for WITW I have bought yet another treatment which has to be applied over night and washed off in the morning. I have my daughter at home (she is 5) and I am supposed to be at work. I really think they should bring back nit nurses so all children are checked and treated!!

And the cost of treatments put people off!!!

I've vowed to comb my DD's hair every Sunday in the bath until she's 18. It took us 2 moths to get rid of the last little feckers at the end of last year. Since taking this approach I have found 1 adult louse (and he was a big bugger) at which point I upped the combing for 2 weeks to every other day. And it appears to be working, we have been currently lice free for 3 weeks (and a good 8 weeks before I found the adult one). Luckily DS's seem immune to them, but I do keep an eye.

You can't treat headlice with chemicals effectively. Kills the crawlers but not the eggs & there can be 1000's from one pair of lice.

Combing regularly and for prolonged periods is the only way to ensure you break the life cycle of the little feckers

Very Useful Website- all parents should read.

Lots of information and researched based tips. The comb sets can be got on prescription from your GP.

Maybe you could ask the teacher to do a handout for all the parents OP with reasearch from this site as it is an official NHS one.

FWIW I had a helluva battle with this problem when mine were tots & this website was our salvation. Hence I recommend it to anyone who will listen!

Nits take more than a day to lay eggs and about 7 days to hatch. So she probably did have them before half term.

I don't think once a week combing is enough because an egg can hatch in five days.

Probably best to do it twice a week.

I think its a lack of education. It is not expensive to get rid of nits. Just very hard work. You wash your child's hair, slap on some bog standard conditoner and fine tooth comb your child's hair PROPERLY. It takes at least twenty minutes to fine tooth a comb a person's head. You need to check every part of the scap carefully and comb each hair from the root. With long hair you need to divide the head of hair up into sections and work on each section of hair carefully. This needs to be repeated every day during an outbreak.

The problem with chemicals is that nits come resistant to them. I doult that hedrin have changed their formula. What has changed is the nits. It is Darwin's evolution in action.

If you are hard up you can get a nitty gritty comb off the GP. There is no excuse.

mumeeee an adult louse can begin laying eggs the minute it arrives on a head

I do agree though, it seems unlikely the child caught them after one day at school if it was as bad as the OP says.

Forgot to add nits are immune to most chemicals so they don't work. You need to put loads of conditioner on and comb through the hair.

BossyB Chemicals can work on the eggs as well. We used Nyda properly once on all the family. All gone in 48 hours. The idea that someone has taken 2 months to get rid of them all I'm sorry fills me with horror and explains why the problem is such a problem.

Completely agree reallytired

I agree with the original post.

yes the nits & eggs are rock hard & impermeable, the headlice can still be killed but who wants to repeatedly put expensive chemicals on their childs head?

You have to build it into the bath/bedtime routine.

I used to wash & condition their hair in the bath & comb through the conditioner first with a regular comb then a nit comb, could get hundreds out that way.

Then get a DVD on, give them something to nibble ( I had to resort to chocolate buttons then when we were in the routine swapped it for fruit chunks!)

Comb through each bit of the hair as RT says sectioning as you go using a nit comb. Sit behind them & comb through with a bowl of water, so you can see how many you are getting.

If there are loads do it daily/every other day at least then when they seem to be lessening or gone keep doing it for at least 12 days preferably 2 weeks.

I'd suggest doing it every 3 days regardless of the current state of the scalp. The conditioner helps keep the shaft of the hair slippy so the eggs are less likely to attach & therefore are easier to comb out.

Tea-tree oil is a great preventative, but I'd put it in the conditioner not neat as it'll go further.

No easy or quick solution which is why they are such a problem as many mums can't be arsed I'm afraid!

I think it should be compulsory for each parent to attend a one hour course with the nit nurse

DS2 gets them often and I'm pretty sure it's from his best mate

I find that whilst the nit comb gets the lice, the eggs slip through and I have to drag them out one by one down the length of the hair. Or are there any really good combs out there?

Oh my God my head got so itchy reading that that I decided to check my own hair for nits.
I had all my hair over my face and was grooming myself like a monkey, looked up to see the window cleaner grinning at me through the window.

Combing doesn't always work.

We have 2 nitty gritty combs and we've done it nightly for weeks with 2 adults doing it(hair in sections)with masses of tea tree conditioner,rinsing and wiping said combs after every swipe until we've both done every patch several times and dd's scalp is red-still got nits.

The reasons this never gets dealt with is

a)schools don't send kids home like they used to
b)the Nitty Gritty comb is being over sold,it isn't 100% effective
c)the use of the Nitty Gritty comb is highly impractical if you have several kids and 2 working parents(who can go through the palaver we're going through at the moment on a regular basis)
d) we need nit nurses
e)proper research(not from companies with products to sell)is needed

Just to high jack I've had enough and I'm going to resort to chemicals for the 1st time ever.Can't face the grease of Hedrin(again) and (I'm going to stick our 2 Nitty Gritty combs where the sun don't shine if I get told they are the miracle cure one more time) soooooo hit me with the best bug busting product out there,what is it????????????

I have used Derbac in the past - I have a very sensitive scalp and it used to be ok.

What age do children start getting nits? We've never had them and the DDs have long hair. Is it a school only thing? They play with loads of HE kids and we've not had it. I dread it. I would cut their hair if we had it.

Our PTA are actually thinking of going to the headmaster and asking if something can be done as it is getting ridiculous.
Really? What, exactly, do you expect him to do? You'd have more luck demanding that he put a miraculous stop to cold/flu germs wafting around the school.
Nits are an occupational hazard of any environment where humans are in close head contact. And for all those people "blaming" specific friends - they will have had them passed on to them by someone else, and your own child will, in turn, be sharing theirs with others, until you've absolutely got rid of them, which can take ages.
And yes, agree with those who say that there is no way the OP's child can have been nit-free over half term. To have an infestation such as she describes doesn't happen overnight.

No need to cut hair whatsoever in fact when ds had it and he was infested he had hair that wasn't even an inch all over. It's harder to comb when the hair is short.

I find it so maddening that we are constantly told that due to "human rights" school aren't allowed to have nit nurse type people. or indeed speak directly to the parent of the child with the nits. They just send a letter home to the entire class.

Why should the right to have untreated headlice supersede the right of my daughter not to have a sore scalp from the ridiculous amount of combing we have to do to remove the nits she is constantly picking up from school?

I'm lucky I have 3 short haired boys who plaster their heads with sticky gel

Eldest son had them once when he was about 7yrs old, and he'd let his hair grow longer than a spiky crew cut.

I'm itching, just from reading this thread. We're at (I hope) the tail end of an infestation, so it had better be the thread, not a new bunch of hatchlings!

Weirdly, nit combing is one of the times when I feel like a "proper mummy". It's quite satisfying to see the little buggers coming out. We do it early evening, in front of the telly, and it takes 10-15 minutes per short haired boy, and double that for me and DD.

toddlerama there's no "age" and they come from brushing up against someone who has got them, and that could be anyone. There's no need to chop hair off, just comb and comb and comb. Repellents containing tea tree are reputed to help, as is tying hair back firmly when in company (to reduce hair to hair contact).

Agree Valar and Clam there is plenty the head can do.

I started teaching 20 years ago in the days when you sent kids home and I used to get the whole class to comb their hair over white paper using the free bug busting kits.There was no drama,no stigma and rare cases of nits.You'd get about 1 kid a term,they went home and they got treated.Often came back that afternoon.

My sister only had it once.She was the only one out of the 2 of us during our entire childhood that got it.She got sent home and had some foul stuff put on her hair,went back the next day.It only happened once.

Schools today are infested by comparison.

I'd gladly let the school send any of my 3 home if it stopped this continual reinfection.It effects kids work-their concentration and often they get runny noses and feel lousy(hence the expression),my ds prone to exzema does.

I'm sick of the same kids never getting treated.My dd has a close friend continuously crawling.She watches them crawl in literacy.Dd was so upset a few weeks ago after having yet another red raw scalp she said she was going to keep away from said child.She likes her so much she spent a playtime a few weeks ago picking them out for her as she wants to keep playing with her.

Sorry but I think the way it's dealt with at the moment is verging on cruel for all kids-the ones subjected to continual combing and reinfection and the ones who never get treated.

It's high time heads got off their backsides,got together and did something.

It's often people like the op who cause the problem. If the child is 'caked in lice and eggs" after one day of school then she has actually had them for a while and was probably spreading them before half term. People always think it's someone else passing them on- not their little darlings! Lice are indiscriminate- contrary to popular belief, 'nice' children can pass them on as well as catch them!