Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/super-lice/5023734/
It’s that time of the year again, the beginning of another new school year. In the life of most directors, this typically includes hiring and training new staff, enrolling new children and their families, purchasing materials and supplies, and so on. Just when it feels like everything is off to a grand start, the phone rings, and someone tells you that a child enrolled in your program has head lice. Now you need to write that letter that nobody wants to receive, informing staff and parents to begin checking the children’s scalps. What a nuisance! And if that wasn’t enough to ruin your day, now you may have to deal with a new strain of the nasty little critters: super lice.
Super lice have been diagnosed all over the United States. Like their ordinary head lice cousins, they live on human scalps and feed on blood. They look and behave the same as regular head lice. What’s ‘super’ about them is that they have genetically mutated to be resistant to the active ingredients in many lice treatment products (shampoos and conditioners). Consequently, they are much harder to get rid of.
There are six to twelve million cases of lice reported in children in the United ...