Weekend Family section

Why I spent £400 on getting rid of my children’s head lice

Her kids’ hair was infested with nits but Carla Power found an effective solution – at a price

By Carla Power

I’m writing this to help defray the cost of delousing my daughters. Had anyone told me that I would turn into the kind of woman who spends £414 having nits picked from my children’s heads, I would have told them I had a better chance of winning a Nobel for physics. But last month, I became such a woman, handing over my debit card, again and again, to The Hairforce, a deluxe nit-picking boutique in north London.

Am I stupid, you may ask, or just ridiculously rich? I can rule out the latter. I’m a freelance journalist who is married to a civil servant, so we’re hardly the sort of household with spare hundreds to spend on hair care. When it comes to haircuts, we’re strictly Sunday-nights-with-the-kitchen- scissors folks. Occasionally, I’ll treat myself to a £12 cut at my local salon, but that is pretty much the extent of our household hair budget.

Until last month, that is. My five-year-old, Nicola, had had nits for months. Her older sister, Julia, seven, had been infested with them for the better part of a year, her thick hair so crowded with lice that I could see the hum of nit highways crisscrossing her head from 20 paces, or so I convinced myself. One afternoon, just as I had finished reassuring her teacher that we were nitting religiously, a particularly bold louse scampered across her forehead.

I hadn’t been lying: we were pretty assiduous. I hadn’t the nerve to blast my darlings’ heads with chemicals, so we’d sit, me with my blue plastic nit comb and a bottle of spray conditioner, the two girls in their nightgowns, lulled by a DVD. Lit by the bedside lamp, we looked like some ghastly Victorian tableau. They were patient, but even so, after entire seasons of such nights passed, both girls were in revolt. There were tears, pleadings, scenes. And despite gallons of tea tree oil and lashings of over-the-counter potions, the insects kept going forth and multiplying.

Earlier in the year, I had read about The Hairforce, which gets rid of nits for £40 a session. At first, I had dismissed it: calling in the professionals was for the rich or timid, not us. We could handle this ourselves. By late August, I had changed my mind. School was starting in a week, and Julia’s head remained a megalopolis for nits. I gritted my teeth and ferried the girls to the elegant Primrose Hill terrace in north London, where Dee Wright runs her business in her former living room.

Julia was met by her so-called Lice Assassin, Aileen, a young woman wearing medical magnifying goggles and a white lab coat embossed with the slogan “Comb to Kill” in lavender. Would the girls like a DVD or a game? With Julia transfixed by a film and Nicola happily jabbing at a games console, Aileen went to work. She parted Julia’s hair into sections, then combed, then wielded a giant vacuum cleaner fitted with a nit comb. Within minutes, she had the bottom of a tiny paper cup littered with lice corpses. Soon, she was calling for backup. Hairforce counts the lice and eggs (or nits, as eggs are known), in a chart for each child. “You need an intelligent clearing system,” explains Wright, a crisply articulate former ad executive who launched Hairforce in 2007. “A quantitative approach helps you understand an infestation, so we can educate you. That way, we take out the fear factor and make it a clear, understandable process.”

Britain’s £30m nit and lice market, argues Wright, is far from transparent. “Eighty per cent of what you buy is ineffective,” says Wright. “It’s pretty much a rip-off industry.” She thinks her own business, by contrast, is performing a crucial social service, as lice can affect everything from children’s schoolwork to their self-esteem. “We’ve had children sitting in the back of the class, because they were so embarrassed by their lice,” she says. “Or being too shy to audition for the school play because of them.”

Globally, nits are a growing industry, with boutiques and mini-businesses popping up to counter increasingly virulent strains. Classified as the second most communicable childhood disease after the common cold, lice can do more than simply itch. Bacteria on their faeces can cause runny noses, and they can interfere with sleep and focus. “They’re a brilliant opponent, really interesting,” says Wright, who cites their nimbleness – “they’re like monkeys” – and speed: 23.5cm a minute. “They can become immune to products, but not to hand-clearing.”

Julia had, according to her assassins’ log, “thousands” of lice and “zillions – uncountable” numbers of nits. “So is this the worst case you’ve ever seen?” I ask, perversely chuffed at our spectacular score. “It’s a heavy infestation … ” agrees Wright. Even with two women labouring over Julia’s head for nigh on two hours, combing by hand, peering through their magnifying goggles, she was so infested she had to go back the next day. In the end, she had multiple sessions with a couple of people working on her scalp, while her sister, who also had “thousands” of nits, plus 250 fully grown lice, needed several sessions of her own.

As happily nit-free as we are – at least until the next infestation hits school – I still feel a bit of a fool for parting with so much money. One mother told me about a £15 electric zapper that works, another about barber shops that do head-clears for £20. Would they work? Who knows? But I do know that I haven’t seen a louse for a month – and that’s worth a lot.

Link to The Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/24/nits-head-lice-infest

Channel 4’s Embarrassing Bodies filmed us clearing a wonderful girl from Ipswich.  Her Mum had been struggling to rid her of her infestation for a very long time.  Cleared of a substantial build up of nits, we all witnessed a very happy transformation.  This will be aired in the Spring of 2010.

Link: http://www.channel4embarrassingillnesses.com/

Finding a solution to an irritating problem

By Sarah Ebner

A single scratch of the head is enough to make normally sane parents panic. Their fear … headlice.

Only a few weeks into the new school year, and far too many children (and some unfortunate parents) will already be suffering from the dreaded lice attack. Gone are the days of the nit nurse, and also gone are the days when lice affected only a small number of children. New research suggests that between 10 and 20 percent of Britain’s 4 million primary school children will have headlice at any one time — up from around one per cent in the 1980s.

“There are so many kids now with relatively high levels,” says Dr Ian Burgess, Director of the Medical Entomology Centre in Cambridge, and a headlice expert. “They’re passing the lice around easily.”

There are many reasons why headlice have become so common, but there are three main ones — changes in school practice, resistance to insecticides, and a lack of urgency in dealing with them.

Although a surprising number of parents (one in four according to the latest research) still think that their school does nit checks, most do not, which means that the issue slips out of many parents’ minds. There is now a feeling that periodic inspections would, “be valueless, unless carried out weekly if not daily,” says a spokeswoman from Barnet Council.

“The schools are saying it’s really bad,” says Amanda Coplans, who co-founded Nitty Gritty, an aromatherapy based solution to headlice, 10 years ago. “More children are sitting next to each other at tables rather than desks, there’s more head to head contact, more huddling in groups, and central heating. Lice thrive in that atmosphere.”

Dr Burgess agrees. He explains that this “huddling”, whether to work or sit around a computer, is also partly to blame for the rise in cases of boys, and in secondary schools.

Headlice cannot jump or fly from one head to another. Instead, they crawl on or between hairs and feed on human blood. Lice lay their eggs (which take around a week to hatch) near the scalp, and generally stay close to the skin. Some people do not feel itchy until several weeks down the line.

Once a child is infested, parents have a few options. Headlice are now largely resistant to pesticide-based treatments, although many parents still use them. Instead Dr Burgess recommends newer options such as Hedrin or Full Marks Solution (not mousse). All treatments need to be done in conjunction with (the very boring) combing.

It’s all rather time-consuming, but there is a new solution. The Hairforce, based in Primrose Hill, north-west London, now boasts its own headlice “spa”.

Dee Wright founded the company after hearing many parents complain that they did not know what to do about lice. Customers have their hair vacuumed and combed by headlice “assassins” who go through it pretty much strand by strand (using no chemicals). Children are otherwise engaged watching DVDs or playing on Nintendos.

“We get 18-month-olds to grandmothers,” says Wright. “And at the moment we’re extremely busy because of children going back to school. We also had lots of Jewish families coming to us after all the summer camps. Children with lice pass it around each other. Then they go back to school…”

A visit to the Hairforce is not cheap (it is £40 a session, with three needed) but many grateful parents do not seem to mind. Wright herself argues that it is a failsafe way of removing lice, as opposed to bottled treatments.

Dr Burgess agrees that the Hairforce may have the right idea, but is put off by the cost. He is also convinced that only way to get rid of lice completely would be for the entire community to be treated at the same time.

“If you treat everyone at once, it’s so much more successful, because you can really knock the lice out,” he says. “What we need is a radical re-think, and, of course, continuous vigilance.”

See the article: http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-features/20518/finding-solution-irritating-problem