You Must Get to Know Head Lice to Beat Head Lice

A person with sand-like spots on a strand of hair is sure to have head lice. These sandy dots are nothing but nits, which is from where a louse is hatched, also known as louse eggs. Though some adults can have head lice too, it mostly affects young children. Contact with the infected person should be avoided at all costs, as this is a highly contagious medical disease. You really need to know as much as possible about the lice life cycle to effectively treat them.

While one kind of lice is found mostly in chimpanzees and humans, there is another variety that affects birds and certain mammals. Head lice are tiny wingless parasites and can measure one to three millimeters and feed on blood by attaching themselves to their hosts' scalp.

Head lice can neither jump nor fly since they have no wings. Neither can they walk properly due to the odd shape of their legs. So, how then do they infect another host? It's really quite simple. Since they weigh almost nothing, even the slightest breeze allows them to be swept from one host to another.

Lice are oviparous insects. The female nymphs hatch their fertile eggs, also called nits, onto a strand of hair. Each nit has a cap like structure, ensuring a firm hold onto the shaft of hair. Most of these nits are fertile, and when hatched, give rise to hundreds of newborns. The male louse is bigger than the female, and has longer legs too, to hold the female in a better grasp while mating.

There are 3 stages of nymph development. This means that a new nymph would molt thrice before adulthood, also called three nymphal instars. An instar refers to an arthropod's developmental stage. The time between being a nymph to becoming an adult or an imago is highly dependent on the conditions to which it finds itself in. For as long as it has a ready source of blood from its host, it can take 9 days for a nymph to morph into a fully fledged imago.

The average lifespan of a louse is around four weeks, during which a female louse will lay about fifty to a hundred nits, most of them fertile. These fertile nits take about a week to hatch and then multiply, traveling from one head to another through close contact.

Lice feed on blood around 4 to 5 times each day. They pierce the skin with a retractable mouth part, and inject it with saliva to ensure a smoother flow of blood. Their saliva also helps prevent blood from clotting. While feeding, the lice also excrete dark red biological waste into the skin.

Lice bury themselves deep into the darker parts of its host's body as they are averse to light. Their favorite hideouts other than the scalp are the nape of the neck and the back of the ears.

Immediate treatment should be given to the infected person. There are a number of products available for the treatment of lice. Till such time, avoid sharing pillows or towels or getting too close to the infected person.

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