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Head lice and Halloween!

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Head lice is a huge concern during Halloween! Trying on costumes at the store, all the masks and wigs, sharing funny hats, these are all great ways to pass head lice around.

We recommend a few simple ways to prevent lice this spooky season:

  • Don’t try on head gear or costumes at the store. You never know who had that on right before you!
  • Keep costumes in a plastic bag for 48 hours or in the freezer for 8 hours before you try them on. That still gives you time to return them if they don’t fit, but you can kill any head lice that might be on them before you put it on yourself.
  • Don’t share costumes between people. Keep your costume on your child, with no switching back and forth.

Hopefully these tips will help you stay lice free! Let the scariest thing this fall be your costume, not the head lice on it.

Back to School!

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It’s that time of year again! Lice are prevalent in schools across America, and it seems like Tennessee has been hit pretty hard lately. We have a few quick ways to prevent lice from spreading within your classrooms and schools.

  1. Keep long hair up. Lice don’t jump or fly, they travel from loose hair to loose hair. Buns and braids are the best way to keep lice from making the switch to your head. Keeping all the flyaways down is very important!
  2. No head to head contact. Even a bun won’t save you if you put your head on someone else’s head.
  3. Peppermint spray. Tea tree oil does not prevent head lice. A good preventive spray uses essential oil from the mint family, of which peppermint is the best.
  4. Vacuum or lint roll yourself and your furniture. Both vacuuming and lint rolling will get lice off of soft surfaces. For plastic or vinyl, use a Clorox wipe.
  5. Hugs, unfortunately, are a good way to spread head lice. Side hugs, high fives, and fist bumps are good alternatives! Selfies are also responsible for the rise of head lice in middle, high school, and college students. Be sure to warn your students about the dangers or touching heads.
  6. Sharing is not all that caring. Even sharing things like jackets can spread head lice, because many people have hair long enough to touch the fabric. Hoodies that get pulled on over the head will also spread lice.

When in doubt, contact your lice clinic for a head check. At only $25, we can give you peace of mind within 30 minutes.

If you have any questions, call or email us today!

Summer is here!

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Warm weather is finally here! Schools will be out, the pools are open, summer camps are looking at registration, and your vacation is being planned. Head lice don’t take the summer off, and neither should you. Here are a few tips for staying lice free this summer!

  1. Continue head checking your children! Check before and after events, like camps, family reunions, or vacations. Our head checks are $25, and we comb through the entire head. If you come in for a product purchase to get a comb, we will do a comb out demo to make sure you know what you are looking for!
  2. Bring your own pillow to sleepovers! Make sure your children don’t share brushes, hoodies, or pillows. Lice only7 need 3 seconds to transfer heads, and anything that goes from head to head can bring a bug with it.
  3. Keep your hair up! Tight buns and braids are the best ways to stay lice free. Peppermint preventive spray to finish off a hairstyle will help keep lice away from your head as well.
  4. Selfies are dangerous! By all means, take those photos, but keep your heads from touching when you do it.
  5. If you go swimming, don’t share towels! They can grab the fabric and get delivered to a new head as you dry off.

Because lice can hold their breath for 19 hours, swimming pools are safe. The little bugs just take a deep breath and hold on tight, they’re not interested in swimming to a new head.

Have fun this summer, and do it lice free!

Holiday Head Lice Checklist

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No one wants to deal with head lice, especially after a hectic and stressful holiday period!  Parents have enough on their plates with the travel, entertaining, shopping, and cleaning everything up after the New Year.  We put together this head lice checklist for preventing lice infestations after the holidays.

Unfortunately, the holidays can be a peak time for head lice, so it is important to be vigilant.  This is especially true if you traveled to spend time with other families or hosted other families in your home. Lice primarily spread through head-to-head contact, and children get lice more often than adults do because kids spend more time in close contact.

Whether you were the visitor or the visited, there are some steps you can take to ensure that you don’t send your child back to school with head lice.

  1. Get a professional lice screening. If there is a chance you or your children were exposed to head lice over the holidays, the best thing you can do for yourself and your peace of mind is get a professional head lice screening. We offer them for just $25, and if you do have head lice and choose to be treated at our clinic, that fee is waived. Head lice can be very difficult to diagnose, and false positives are very common. You do not want to get treated for head lice if you don’t have the bugs!
  1. Use preventative products. People tend to deal with head lice reactively—meaning we freak out when we find head lice in our children and try to get rid of the problem as fast as we can. That’s perfectly normal, but we now have products that can help to prevent head lice in the first place. Peppermint Spritz, Spearmint Conditioner (my personal favorite!), Peace Love Mint Preventive Headbands, Treatment Goop and Terminator Combs are available at our clinic or on our online store. Unlike most over-the-counter lice products, all Knoxville Lice Clinic products are safe and pesticide-free.

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We get lice, too!

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We deal with a lot of head lice in this job. Prevention is our best friend, and we head check each other constantly! Some of our favorite things to prevent lice are :

  • Our giant fluffy hats. Jennifer hand makes most of them so that all our hair is covered when we’re messing with people’s hair!
  • Lint rollers! We lint roll ourselves a LOT. Lice can’t hold to fabric very well, and this way we can be sure we don’t have lice on our clothes when we take our hats off.
  • Tight buns and braids. We keep our hair under the hats, but it’s easiest to prevent little strands from escaping if we have our hair pinned up.
  • Preventive spray! One of my coworkers does a little dance every day as she rains peppermint spray down over herself – and anyone standing nearby! It works though, she stays very lice free.
  • Head checks. We all have our paranoid moments. Usually, one of us will come in saying we itch and need a head check, and get teased about being paranoid during a good comb out. Then the next week, it’s that person’s turn to be scared!
  • Sometimes, we will Treatment Goop a client and send them home. It is important to us to stay lice free, and after a certain amount of bugs in a person’s hair, we will Treatment Goop a client and send them home to wash so they can come back without excess living bugs, and we can protect our employees. This is rare, but does occasionally happen.

 

Some of what we do is in our own lives. One of my coworkers came in with lice and thought she got it at work. When we checked her child to make sure he was lice free, he was much worse than mom! We do head checks on our families fairly often, just like we advise our clients to do. Head lice are a very easy thing to miss, unless you’re looking closely. Our college students tend to wear their hair up while on campus, and we all are a little wary of hugging people or sharing anything.

Because so many people have head lice, it is important to be careful where ever you are. As my coworker Sarah says, “Constant vigilance!”

 

 

Who to Tell About Head Lice

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We have a lot of families in here who find out they have head lice and freeze. Who do they tell? How far back to do they need to go? What if it’s embarrassing?

The hard truth is that you need to share the information. Most people have head lice from 6-8 weeks before the population builds up enough to become noticeable, so you need to look at least two months back to see who to inform. This isn’t just for their benefit; if you don’t tell anybody, they can’t get checked, and there is a risk that they can give it back to you and you’ll have to do this whole thing over again.

Here is a general list of who you need to contact about having lice:

  • Family. If you saw your sister, or just babysat your nephews, or the kids spent the weekend at their grandparents, all those people have been exposed to lice.
  • Friends. Many of our clients are in school, and their friends’ parents need to know that their children have been exposed to lice. This is even more critical if they have sleepovers, or if they hug or share jackets or hats.
  • Significant others. If you have lice, odds are the person you hang out with a lot has lice, as well. Hugs, cuddles, and bed sharing are great ways to spread lice. For middle or high school students, borrowing a hoodie or jacket from someone you have a crush on is a great way to catch it, even with minimal personal contact.
  • Roommates, dorm mates, sorority sisters, or fraternity brothers. If you share a living space, there’s a great chance you accidentally shared lice.
  • Sports teams. Sometimes Little League teams share helmets. Most girls’ teams require ponytails, which can flip lice through the air from girl to girl during a game or cheerleading or dance routine. In addition, these teams foster tight friendships, so you can often inform their friend circle and their team with a few calls.
  • Child care. Day cares have lice the same way schools do, and so do after school programs. If you have a regular babysitter, nanny, or just a good friend or family member who watches your child, let them know as well.
  • Salons. Sometimes your hairdresser will miss seeing lice in your hair. Because they work so closely with hair, they have special regulations associated with head lice. It is a good policy to let them know if there’s a chance you had lice during your last visit.

The good news is, we can help. If you give us names and numbers, we will call schools, dance groups, coaches, after school programs, day cares, and hair dressers. We do it anonymously, saying only that we had a client come in (in Mrs. Smith’s class, in 9th grade, in the 7pm dance class on Wednesdays) who had lice. They are now lice free, but the client requested we inform the business that head lice were in their location.

The only way to keep our community lice free is if the entire community works together. Some schools cannot inform parents that head lice were found, so your best bet is to tell your friends. Moms have an amazing informal information network. Your school’s PTA can help make sure that people are doing monthly head checks and keeping their children clear, which will reduce the likelihood of your own children catching it again.

House Cleaning for Head Lice

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Cleaning your house is vital to getting head lice out of your life. With so much misinformation on the internet, I wanted to give you a list of what to clean and how to do it, so you can move right on with your lice-free life.

  • Wash all bedding, towels, and clothing used by infested family members in the past 48 hours. Use hot water or high heat settings.
  • Things that can’t be washed can still be put in the dryer for 45 minutes on high.
  • If it can’t go in the dryer, bag it up for 48 hours. Lice need to feed every 3 hours, and will starve to death in 48 hours.
  • Hair things like brushes, combs, hair ties, hair bows, hats, or helmets, can go in the freezer for 8 hours.
  • Vacuum or use a lint roller on everything fabric. Vacuum the floors, lint roll or vacuum the couches/recliners.
  • Remember to vacuum or lint roll your car!
  • Smooth surface things can be wiped down with Clorox wipes.

Lice don’t burrow, so you only need to clean the surface of things. You don’t have to throw anything out.

Don’t use bug sprays or bug bombs. Lice are immune to the pesticides, so it needlessly covers your house in poison without actually killing the lice.

Having lice is stressful. Getting rid of it doesn’t have to be. With these easy tips, you can get your house clean in a few hours, and have your life back faster.

Head Lice Prevention Month

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September is Head Lice Prevention month, a good time to call attention to the facts of head lice as children go back to school—typically a peak period for the head-loving bugs. Once children start playing, hugging, and taking selfies with friends, and, if someone in the group has head lice, the bugs will spread. 

Parents often panic when they get the call from school that their child, or a child in class has head lice. The first thing we tell them is they didn’t do anything wrong, and neither did their child other than maybe hug or touch hair with someone who has head lice. The true facts about head lice can help diffuse parents fear and stress.

To help parents be informed and prepared, you can review the basics of head lice infestations, prevention, and treatment.

  1. Head lice have nothing to do with economic status or the cleanliness of the home. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Association of School Nurses are very clear on this.
  1. Head Lice don’t represent a health threat. They don’t carry or cause any diseases or illness other than itching. Again, health professionals are very clear on this. Lice are simply a nuisance.
  1. 98% of the time head lice only spread through head-to-head, contact. They cannot jump or fly. They can only live on a human scalp, and they cannot live anywhere else since they dehydrate and quickly become too weak to move. As a matter of fact, head lice do not want to leave the scalp at all; since they feed on human blood up to 6 times per day. That may be disgusting, but it’s true. Lice don’t want to be on your sofa, on stuffed animals or the carpet. The good news is, you don’t need to treat your home with lice-killing products. They are ineffective, pesticide-based and can be toxic. Simply wash any bedding, towels and clothing the child with head lice has had contact with in the last 48 hours, lint roll upholstered surfaces, and freeze brushes and hair accessories for 8 hours.
  1. Help prevent head lice by educating your child to avoid hair-to-hair and head-to-head contact. You can also prevent lice by keeping her hair pulled back in a braid, tight bun or short ponytail.
  1. Traditional pesticide-based lice products are no longer working! The most recent study, published in the Journal of Medical Entomology in 2016, found that 98 percent of head lice in 48 states are now immune to the pesticides used in traditional lice products. The most popular drugstore products are still pesticide-based.
  1. Head lice products do NOT kill all the lice eggs (sometimes called nits), and so, the 10-day process requires repeated applications and tedious nitpicking to get all the eggs out. Common reasons for at-home treatment failure is using the popular pesticide-based products or parents missing just a few tiny nits, which hatch, and the lice return.
  1. Traditional lice products often use pesticides, and most parents don’t realize that. Even if those products still worked, would parents really want to douse their child’s head in pesticides when there are safer, faster, more effective alternatives available? Not only are pesticides no longer effective, repeated use has been shown to cause behavioral issues.
  2. At Knoxville Lice Clinic, our professionals quickly and easily get rid of head lice.  The Headwinds Heat Treatment gets rid of lice in a single treatment. That’s right, one treatment, one hour and you are lice free! Parents love this ‘one and done’ option and are so relieved to have lice out of their life so quickly.  Our Saline Comb Outs take only 2 visits — generally an hour at the first visit and 30 minutes at the follow up.

“Prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Benjamin Franklin

Knowing the facts can go a long way toward reducing stress and anxiety about head lice.

Knoxville Lice Clinic is the exclusive provider of lice treatment using the Headwinds heat treatment device. It’s fast, non-toxic, and pesticide free. Our professional, certified head lice technicians are friendly and knowledgeable and will relieve all the stress and anxiety head lice may cause you and your family. Knoxville Lice Clinic also offers pesticide-free and effective do-it-yourself lice treatment solutions, along with lice prevention products.

Have a lice-free school year!

It’s Sports Season!

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It’s football season! Which means it’s also cheerleading and marching band season. I know teenagers in football, marching band, color guard, lacrosse, drumline, and cross country. Sports are great! Anything with a team gives children (and adults!) a sense of family, that tight friend group that welcomes you in and makes you belong.

Unfortunately, having people that close often leads to lice. Shared baseball helmets in Little League, volleyball team sleepovers, the swim team that lends brushes between girls. These are all great ways to share head lice. Even team pictures can have people close enough to share head lice. Once it finds its way onto a team, the only way to be really clear of it is to have everybody be lice free at the same time.

That’s where we come in. We can eradicate lice from your entire team in one weekend, often one day. Between head checks, our in-clinic treatments, and our DIY options, we can get the whole team, including coaches, back into practice and winning games without the distraction of an itchy head. Our Peppermint Spritz and Spearmint Conditioner helps keep you lice free, and buns and braids instead of pony tails will keep loose hair from a louse’s tiny claws. Overall, our head lice treatment will get you lice free and out the door in time for your next practice, and you won’t miss a single beat.

Why You Should Bring Your Whole Family to the Lice Clinic

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We know that family bonding day at the head lice clinic isn’t high on anyone’s list of family adventures to go on. It can be complicated to get both parents off work, or all the kids at home at the same time on a weekend. Packing up the baby’s stuff, bringing snacks for toddlers, wondering how long until your third grader goes from “irritating but handling it” to “full on melt down,” it’s all hard. So why do those crazy lice people keep insisting the entire family make the trek to the clinic?

 

Believe it or not, we’re trying to help. Lice get transferred very easily, and odds are more people than you think have head lice. In fact, in our informal everyday work, we figured that about 80% of moms, 20% of dads, and 50% of siblings have the dreaded little bugs. The risk is higher for whoever has been combing out the kids, the primary caregiver, or if mom or dad like to bed share or snuggle up and read books or have movie nights with the kids. Because less than half of people with lice will itch, you can completely overlook someone with lice and catch it back from someone living in your own house. We are so serious about getting your whole family lice free, if you bring everyone in, we’ll guarantee the service.

 

Family is important. You want to hug your kids, we want to keep you lice free while you do it.