new thread
Don't try this at home.
MADISON, Wis. -- A man is listed in critical condition after trying to kill his head lice Saturday night. The 26-year-old doused a towel with rubbing alcohol, put it on his head and then lit a cigarette, police said. The towel caught fire and engulfed the man. He suffered burns on about 50 percent of his body, police said.
God, that's AWFUL...Talk about overdoing it!
Hey, at least he didn't have crabs.
Not so unreasonable at second glance. How would you like a head full of these running around?
The Rev
...the bastards! Along with mosquitoes, ticks, houseflies,
flies-in-general, STDs, yuk...who needs them....go away!
I USED TO HAVE LICE. BUT I DIDNT SHAVE MY HEAD. WHAT I DID WAS TO USE HAIR COLORANTS WHICH CONTAIN AMMONIUM, IT CERTAINLY KILLS THE LICE.
They also have special medicated shampoos, etc. for this purpose:
The Rev
14 days....THEN WHAT?!
Yikes! I didn't see that. I guess reapply? I didn't realize that the Nix product only STUNNED the lice, and didn't actually KILL them.
The Rev
Well, I had "crabs" once -- they're the same thing -- only lower on the body. I got a prescription shampoo that killed them in one treatment (best to use it two or three times). There are probably (over the counter) shampoos to do the same. I've never had head lice so I'm not sure about that; however, I'm sure you can use the shampoo either place on your body.
At the grocery store today my daughter and I chuckled over a lice killer product advertised on the back of some magazine. There were arrows pointing to various parts of the head: lice killed here, eggs killed here, nits killed here.
The first thing we chuckled at was that any eggs located 4 inches down the hair shaft hatched several months ago. Yep, those would be easy to kill.
And so would the nits 6 inches down the hair. Oh, and by the way, nits are eggs. Funny how they're on different parts of the hair shaft.
Seriously, though, recently, lice have become increasingly resistant to lice killing shampoos. The last time my daughter had lice, I put a louse in straight lice shampoo, waited for 20 minutes, and it was still alive. In such a case, the most sure cure is daily nitpicking (that word is not in the vernacular without good cause).
One cure that you will find if you do enough research is to suffocate them. This is done by coating the hair and scalp with Vaseline. The problem is, the Vaseline is extremely hard to remove. The best way to remove the Vaseline is with peanut butter. Of course then you have to take out the peanut butter. Fortunately, that's easier than vaseline.
Interestingly, there are no known diseases transmitted by lice, other than, perhaps cooties, especially in the case of crabs. So they don't pose a health hazard, just an annoyance.
Sometimes the source of the lice will go undetected for a long period of time. There was a family whose children kept acquiring lice, despite the good efforts of the school and the family. Only after a specially intensive inspection effort did someone discover that the lice were originating from the kids' grandmother's eyebrows. The closely knit family allowed for the lice to climb from the grandmother's eyebrows onto her grandchildren's hair when they gave each other hugs.
Crabs are also lice, but they are of a different species, and as another poster indicated, they live in the pubic region and are generally communicated by sex (although I have seen rest area bathrooms with signs warning that the crabs are so bad that they will jump on you even if you hover over the toilet).
I've occasionally thought it would be cool to breed a special breed of lice that actually worked for its room and board. Its job would be to travel up and down the hair shafts detangling the hair, especially thos small, annoying tangles that are either impossible for a human to detangle or require the use of a needle.
A louse is hundreds of times bigger than a chigger. I looked at a chigger once using a microfiche machine. Looks quite a bit like a louse, but chiggers are not insects, and lice are.