Super Lice are here and they’re ready to latch onto your schoolchildren’s head and plow away at their scalps and guess what? There’s nothing you can do about it. At least not yet. Super lice cannot be killed by the normal means, which used to include special shampoos and cleaning agents as well as detox of the entire house to rid the house of lice. As simple as lice may seem from a biological standpoint, they are evolving and have developed the ability to resist common treatments for lice, thus they have become super lice that cannot be killed by usual means.
There are, as of yet, no medical treatments to kill super lice. No shampoos and no old school remedies for lice are working on these resistant and pesticide immune buggers, thus parents and health officials are looking for other effective ways to kill super lice. It’s hard to believe, but even DDT, the deadly chemical and one that used to be used in lice treatments, no longer works, thus you can see the scope of the problem. With no medical or chemical treatments for super lice, there are few options and most are only experimental at this stage. Most chemicals that we try, even gentle ones like vinegar or tea tree oil and coconut oil, eventually get absorbed into the genetic structure of lice and this resistance and immunity gets passed onto the next generation of baby super lice.
The options for treating super lice are not pretty. Everything in your home will need to be washed with bleach, if possible, and on the highest temperature setting. Since lice cannot live for long without your delicious, juicy head, take the family on a vacation. Just not to a hotel that I will ever stay at. Go camping and, like monkeys, sit around and comb with the nit removing comb each other’s hair and for boys, shave their heads. Remember that while most lice only live for about a month, one lady lice can lay between 5-10 eggs each day. It is essential to study about what lice eggs look like and remove them using special combs and with the help of someone who is not too grossed out to touch your head. Chances are, if they’re in your family, you have it too.
These super lice are no longer being effected by popular shampoos like Rid or Nix, for instance, thus making the option of shaving your child’s head to get rid of lice more of a realistic option than ever before. There are also no prescription grade shampoos or ways to kill super lice available on the market yet that can defeat the dreaded super lice, thus for now, all parents can do is look for alternative means of getting rid of lice that are, for all intents and purposes, deathproof.
What is rather frightening about these super lice, aside from the more obvious itchy and icky scare factors, is that more generally, these super lice represent what Americans, including our children who pick up all sorts of nasty things at school and daycares, will have to face this same crisis with bacteria. Right now, antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria are becoming increasingly apparent and while just like in the case of lice, it used to be a simple treatment applied to a nasty little problem, the old treatments will no longer work.
This is not meant to be factitious, I swear, but perhaps we are just going to have to learn to live with lice for a while until there is something offered through chemical or medical science that offers super lice sufferers a safe alternative to the old non-functional shampoos. In an effort to minimize the number of these super lice, the detection combs can be used to wick away lice eggs, called nits, and the ones that survive…well, we’ll just have to be itchier than we were before. How awful, I know.
Lice and bacteria have continued to mutate in order to become resistant to antibiotics and medicated shampoos, which for lice, are the equivalent to pesticides for the scalp. Just as in the case with antibiotics and the bacteria that grew resistant, one cause is that people did not properly use lice treatments and only used them for a short time rather than for the recommended length of time, thus giving the lice time to build a resistance, breed, and pass on this resistance to lice treatments to their super lice brethren. While the issue of super lice is creepy enough on its own, now that’s we’re seeing it with something small, we have some kind of clue of what will happen when bacteria, some of them deadly, no longer respond to our treatments through antibiotics.
