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Looking for Lice: How to protect, detect and treat lice heading into the school year

Posted at 8:07 AM, Aug 21, 2019
and last updated 2019-08-21 13:22:34-04

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - Watch out! Kids returning to school from summer break could bring a little something extra...lice!

And you don't want it in your house.

Under the right conditions, lice is pretty easy to get. Experts at Lickety Nit, a lice treatment business in Virginia Beach and Newport News, say if someone's hair makes contact with another person's and they have lice it can be transferred. The same goes if hair touches a surface recently touched by the hair of a person with lice.

Lickety Nit says summer is their busy season and they expect to stay busy into the school year.

They say parents should watch to see if their kids are scratching their heads and warn that people with lice could feel something moving on their head. That's why it's important parents check their kids for lice and nits, the eggs that attach to hair, weekly.

“You don’t get it at the swimming pool, you won’t get it from somebody sitting across the room or walking with somebody, but sitting in close proximity and your hair happens to touch someone else’s hair or kids at school, it could fall onto the desk, the next kid sits down, leans their head on the desk, it’s that easy," said Doris Crouch, a Registered Nurse who works at Lickety Nit.

Crouch says lice like clean, fresh-smelling hair so it may not be a bad idea to keep hair-washing to every other day or every few days, if possible.

If a child does contract lice, stay vigilant.

“[Parents] will use the treatment solution that they bought over the counter, but they won’t do the combing and that won’t get rid of it," said Crouch. "Absolutely, it takes both, it takes combing and solution. You have to be very vigilant for about two weeks if you want to do it yourself.”

And remember to check everyone in the house. If one person gets lice, there's a good chance others will too.

Lickety Nit offers a number of different services at different price points in their lice treatments. The most pricey, but most effective, is a heated treatment the company says lasts 45 minutes to an hour and kills 99 percent of lice in one sitting. It's $159.

No matter what you decide, make sure lice is treated and quickly before it spreads to others.

Click here for more tips on how to win the school year