The Facts of Lice: Test Your Knowledge

Lice Place

As part of out Lice Alert, here is the first installment of our Facts of Lice.

Doing a quick search, we found that there are tons and tons of solutions online. But during an emergency- when else are you really going to do a search on “lice” + “how to get rid of?”- is not exactly the best time to sort through what is true, what is sorta true and what will cause your scalp to melt off but somehow leave lice unharmed.

So I went to a local expert, the Lice Place in Cool Springs, to get the facts and nothing but the facts. I was surprised by how little I knew, and by how wrong a lot of what I thought I knew about lice- and how to get rid of them- was.

Come on down . . .

Here’s an especially relevant one:

Lice are affected by cold weather . . . 

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False. 

Yep. The temperature and season of the year have NO AFFECT on lice. Isn’t that just special?

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Lice Can Jump . . .

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False

Lice don’t jump or fly.  They crawl. VERY FAST.  Transfer from person to person typically happens when heads touch or are in close proximity; almost exclusively, head-to-head contact is how they migrate.  Think school bus, lunch room, selfies, hugging, roughhousing, etc.

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Poor personal hygiene or dirty hair make lice more likely. . . 

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False.

Lice is an equal-opportunity parasite.  Cleanliness has nothing to do with it.  Socio-economic standing has nothing to do with it.

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Kids are more likely to get lice . . .

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True.

Head lice is second only to the common cold as conditions most likely affecting elementary school kids, with a  1 in 4 chance in any elementary school year.  But it’s not uncommon for parents and siblings to be affected, too.

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Check Back Next Week . . .

. . . when I will look at home remedies, and talk about solutions. You will be surprised by how crazy wrong many do-it-yourself, home solutions really are.  Special thanks again to the Lice Place, for letting me know just how wrong the internet and I were.

And thanks for checking out this week’s installment of the Facts of Lice.