Head Lice Frustrations Driving Some Parents To Risky Treatments

Tuesday, 28 January 2025, 9:03 pm
Article: RNZ

Isra'a Emhail
Luka Forman, Journalist

Some parents have been so overwhelmed by the costs of head lice treatment or been led astray by misinformation that they are resorting to unusual methods, the Kiwi creator of a world-first lice detection powder says.

With lice thriving in warm conditions and students returning to school, iSpyNits founder Kate Ricketts expects cases will "explode again" in a few weeks.

The nit infestations in her two children nearly three years ago was bad enough that she developed a United Nations award-winning glow-in-the-dark powder to detect the tiny critters more easily.

But Ricketts has heard of horror stories of using harsh chemicals such as kerosene, fly spray, flea treatment, as well as myths circulating (fact: lice don't fly or jump) and 'Doctor Google' often being used.

"It's really horrific some of the stuff. [It's] quite harrowing to hear a lot of the stuff from the people themselves and also from our school nursing network," Ricketts said.

"You don't want to be putting fly spray on. There's a whole lot of chemicals that are gonna burn your kid's scalp."

Some parents told RNZ the cost of treatment made it difficult to keep on top of lice, especially when they had more than one child and the lice kept coming back every few weeks.

Auckland-based parent Shalene Williams said it cost about $20 to $30 for a bottle of lice shampoo, which the single mother said added up if nits kept coming back.

"I have heard of people at school who have ended up using flea treatment as a course of action. Or even little girls, I know one of my son's friends had to have her hair shaved...

"Term one and term four is when everyone gears up for the notices, and in summer they're required to wear hats right? I'm sure there's sharing of sunhats going around. It can spread pretty quickly."

Kate Campbell, who has five children, said her whānau would need at least two $30 bottles for a treatment. She believed some families were so overwhelmed by the price they avoided treating nits altogether, which increased the risk of spread.

Ricketts holds workshops at schools to support and inform parents on tackling head lice, a common problem which has existed for thousands of years - a nit comb from the time of the Bronze Age found was found about 10 years ago.

How many children in New Zealand get nits?

School health nursing network Mana Kidz reaches up to 34,000 tamariki and whānau in South Auckland. They help check for head lice and provide treatment and education on how to manage nits effectively.

"The Mana Kidz teams have been seeing a lot of headlice in the last year," Mana Kidz nurse Louise Robertson wrote in an email to RNZ. "It is usually one of the top three child health and wellbeing assessments done each term."

Ricketts estimated about 300,000 children at any one time in New Zealand had lice, but there had been no research into prevalence.

The closest idea we get is Ministry of Health data showing the number of subsidised prescriptions for dimethicone-based medication (the standard treatment for head lice) reached 39,768 in 2023, a 54 percent increase on the year before (25,848).

But Ricketts believed this was a severe under-representation of the actual number of people dealing with lice.

"[A Mana Kidz's report stated] a lot of parents were not accessing any kind of scripts for their children, because they often owed money at the pharmacy or at the doctor … there was a lot of shame in going in and so they would avoid that."

That is why she wants to create a nit index to track cases across the country and target areas that need help.

But another challenge is the updated school guidelines which ask parents to keep their children home until head lice treatment has started. Robertson and Ricketts said this was a problem for parents who both worked and could not stay home to care for their children.

"Most schools confidentially say to me: if we actually adhered to that, we would have no children at school. So that shows you how significant the problem is," Ricketts said.

Why do nits keep coming back to my kids?

The six-legged insect feeds off the blood in our scalp and can hold on to hair shafts, where they literally glue their eggs, or nits, close to the scalp.

The louse camouflages the eggs by injecting a bit of hair pigment, and they shut their spiracles (breathing holes) when they detect water, so they do not drown, Ricketts said.

Plus, a lot of the treatments target the moving lice not unhatched eggs, she said. And you could be missing eggs, no matter how tight your nit comb's teeth are.

"The only way is really removing them with your finger and thumbnail, basically by running it along the hair shaft because the mum actually glues it on with this really strong glue that, if you could bottle it, you'd be a trillionaire."

Even just one missed louse can spell for a reinfestation, Ricketts said.

"When the mum lays an egg, she can lay probably seven to 10 eggs a day … [When] she's not gotten rid of in terms of treatment, she can live about 10 days, so she's going to lay an average of 100 eggs over that short time, which then will hatch and do the same. So you can do the math and that's again how prolific they are."

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