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Recently there has been a lot of news about lice that can't be killed through regular treatments. So should you be worried about so-called "super lice?"
If you ask an elementary school nurse, they'd say few things creep parents out like head lice do.
Utah School Nurses Association President Jaime Ferdinand says, "A head lice infestation emotes a lot of anxiety and a lot of emotion."
But Ferdinand thinks the label "super lice" is a bit misleading, making people think a new kind of lice has emerged. She says these "super lice" are the same lice they've been fighting for years, but they have grown more resistant to the medicines used to kill them.
"The pretty much standard ones, I've seen them work for some people, and for another family they haven't. I can't explain why," she says.
She says she's seeing more cases of drug-resistant lice, but that may be because some parents might not know what to look for when they check their children, or they might not be using the lice killers properly.
"Sometimes you have to put the preparation on a dry head, not a wet head, and when you think of shampoo, you think of, always, a wet head," she explained.
A Utah lab has been developing a new system that kills lice without chemicals.
Larada Sciences Chief Operating Officer Randy Block says, "Ours is a warm air treatment. A single 30-minute treatment kills 96 to 100 percent of the lice, nymphs and the eggs, so every generation of lice, we wipe them all out."
Block says 80 percent of people effected by lice are children, so they're trying to get their "Louse Buster" system to the source of the problem.
"Our objective is to get this into institutional settings, principally schools and other places of high concentrations where you find kids primarily," he says.
Block says drug-resistant lice are penetrating deeper into the United States. "In other countries, Great Britain for example, 80, 90, 100 percent of the lice are all drug resistant now. You can't kill them. In South America, in Israel, in Turkey and in other countries in Asia, [it's the] same story. These drug-resistant lice are all over the world," he says.
Nurses say the best way to prevent an infestation is through constant monitoring and combing your child's hair thoroughly.
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
