Combing Wet Hair Fights Lice Better Than Chemicals

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A kit that contains a fine-toothed comb and instructs people how to run it through wet, conditioned hair is four times more likely to rid scalps of lice than over-the-counter chemical treatments, according to new study findings released Friday.

Study author Dr. Nigel Hill of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK, explained that head lice chemical treatments, or pediculicides, have become much less effective over the years because head lice have become increasingly resistant to the chemicals.

The kit, known as the Bug Buster, is widely used in the UK, Hill noted. By removing lice from hair with a fine-toothed comb every 3 to 4 days, people break the "life cycle" of the bugs, he said, which gets rid of them for good.

Although annoying, head lice are essentially harmless, and spread by head-to-head contact, usually by people who know each other well. They are most common in children, but adults can also get lice, which attach their eggs to hair shafts. The bugs are usually found at the back of the neck and behind the ears.

Pediculicides are chemicals that kill head lice by blocking their nervous system, and resemble the insecticides sprayed on flowers and vegetables to kill pests.

To investigate which treatment kills head lice better, the researchers asked the guardians of 133 children between the ages of 2 and 15 with head lice to try either the Bug Buster kit or a single-treatment of pediculicides.

Reporting in the British Medical Journal, Hill and his team say that the Bug Buster cured 57 percent of the children who tried it, while the pediculicides worked only 13 percent of the time.

The researcher noted that he and his team did not test whether people get the same results as the Bug Buster Kit simply using a fine-toothed comb on wet hair. "There is evidence that wet combing as a treatment is only as good as the fine tooth comb used," Hill said. "We know that the Bug Buster comb has been optimized over many years and is likely to be highly efficient."

Consequently, he suggested that wet combs might work, but perhaps not as well as the kit.

He added that neither he nor any of his co-authors have a financial relationship with the makers of the Bug Buster kit or other head lice products. "We are very careful to maintain our independence," he noted.

SOURCE: British Medical Journal, August 5, 2005.