NITMIX

This is just a short not to say the blog is back online after a long break and a lot of heartache.

The simple story is that I messed up upgrading my old MovableType blog! I messed up so badly that I locked myself out of the Head Lice Advice Blog and over wrote the old one so I couldn’t restore it either. Big lesson on backing up correctly and also about delegating jobs to folk who really know what they are doing.

Funny how that stuff we know really well seems so simple while getting off our area of expertise throws us and leaves us floundering. That’s a good lesson for the head lice advice blog too. Parents don’t expect their kids to catch bugs. They don’t go staring into a child’s hair every day just to see if there is a problem brewing up. This means a first bout of head lice usually goes un-noticed for many days…..usually weeks before becoming evident. So the problem is severe by the time parents take any action at all.

The first reaction is often panic or revulsion, neither of which help much but they are understandable.

Next comes a leap into action and a visit to the pharmacy or the doctor and the purchase of a bottle of “instant lice cure”

We’ve all done it. I am not being hard on parents here, it seems like the right thing to do but the results are often disappointing, even confusing. They are rarely successful. Then comes the deeper research to understand the problem of head lice a little better and to understand why the head lice aren’t gone. That is usually when parents discovery NITMIX and the pages and pages of advice and stories about curing head lice.

In the next few weeks I will be updating the head lice advice blog more often and talk some more about getting this simple problem licked.

Heard stories of head lice that are resistant to every treatment under the sun? So have we, but we don’t believe half of them. Read on….
Read the rest of this entry »

We need to talk about stragglers.

These are the few lice or eggs left behind when traditional pesticide lice treatments don’t kill 100% effectively-which is most of the time. Even if you follow the maker’s instructions and treat twice, a week apart, you’re still left guessing if you got them all.

We have already explained how tiny baby lice are and how difficult it is to see them, let alone round them up. Remember, the baby lice you will be looking for popped out of those tiny egg cases, so they are even tinier than the eggs they hatched from.

Some parents have difficulty spotting the eggs themselves, let alone these even smaller baby lice. Oh, and of course they can now run around, making spotting them even harder!

So what happens is parents do a great job of removing or killing lice and eggs (nits), but they just don’t get to the last few… the Stragglers.

There is nothing to see or feel while a few surviving eggs hatch out or a live louse grows to maturity. It takes a whole week for those few tiny critters to grow up. They have bitten the skin to feed a few times a day but you won’t know it because your body just doesn’t notice.

A week later they are adults and start to lay more eggs, six to eight a day each, but still this would take a lot of searching to find. No one will notice this level of activity.

After the second week these new eggs start to hatch. But they’re tiny too-the size of sand grains-and their tiny bites don’t cause any problems, either.

By the end of the third week the numbers are rising and fast! You suddenly have hundreds of big, medium and little lice, and your kids probably still haven’t noticed a thing.

Have you seen this? Two to three week gaps between explosions of head lice?

Some parents have been trapped in this cycle for months and even years and all because they weren’t told how to capture stragglers!

You can’t nearly succeed in cleaning out stragglers. If you only succeed 99 percent at removing stragglers, you get 100-percent failure to “cure” your problem.

Parents get confused and disheartened with head lice treatments when they find themselves trapped in this circle of treatment/lice/treatment. Soon they start to feel they may never break out and get desperate.

That name should be writ up large on your refrigerator: Stragglers!

It’s these guys that cause the misery, not some mythical mutant or resistant head lice.

You can read plenty of examples from our web site at www.nitmix.com, natural head lice treatment, how parents have broken out of this nightmare of multiple treatments and repeated failures.

Next we’ll deal with this nonsense about resistant and mutant lice.. HUGE Myth 4

Head lice treatment and childhood leukaemia link?

In a recently published study researchers in France concluded there was sufficient evidence of a link between exposure to various household pesticides and childhood leukaemia to warrant further investigation.

While such studies are far from producing conclusive links between cause and effect of a specific chemical they are often an indication that all is not well. Scientists investigated the history of families of diagnosed cancer sufferers paying careful attention to the use of pesticides in the home, garden and head lice treatments during both pregnancy and early year’s development.

What emerged was a consistent pattern that more families with childhood cancers had also used pesticides in ways that could have contacted their children in the womb or in early life. In scientific circles this is far from proof but it did indicate that much more work needs to be done to understand the possible link.

Unfortunately this study had to rely on the families of over 280 children already struggling with a frightening disease to co-operate with them. To conduct further studies researchers must go through this again many times. That is an awful lot of children suffering before any clear conclusion is made.

What is immediately clear is that, in almost every case, the pesticide exposure to the children was the result of choices made by their parents. Household and garden problems in France don’t involve any life threatening insects or parasites and therefore aren’t so urgent or important that possibly life threatening chemicals must be used. Exposure to pesticides in the home is largely a matter of choice.

In the case of head lice there is no major health threat if children get this condition and certainly nothing to warrant voluntary exposure to pesticides such as pyrethroid, organophosphate or organochlorides. A simple removal program conducted by the parents would eliminate this possible pesticide exposure risk entirely.

As further work continues in this area the risk posed by pesticides in the home will become much clearer but in the mean time simple risk reduction should be the parent’s watchword.

The complete article should be read by anyone concerned by the issues raised in this brief overview.

Household exposure to pesticides and risk of childhood acute leukaemia. F Menegaux, et al. Occupational and Environmental Medicine 2006;63:131-134. © 2006 by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd

Remember when you first brought your baby home from the hospital? You made up the crib with everything you could find that was warm and soft and protective-clean sheets, soft lights, fresh air, soothing quiet music.

Now, can you imagine walking into that room with liquid poison and spraying it onto the pillow, the sheets, the mattress, the floor and walls? And then pouring stinging poisonous shampoo on that precious little head?

How have we gotten here? Outside pressure, that’s how.

When you think about it, we’re stuck back in 1960s thinking about head lice. Back then we believed science would provide a miracle cure for everything. If a guy in a white coat produced a new spray, we believed it was okay to use it. Not anymore-we’re becoming more and more concerned about the pesticides and harsh chemicals that come into our homes and gardens, and are looking for alternatives.

Combing works! Drag a comb through hair full of lice and they will come out in big heaps, if you just do it right. It is much easier than picking out individual eggs and bugs because you don’t need to spot them all individually. You just sweep them up and out they come. I’m not talking about dry combing or messing about with Vaseline or mayonnaise. These “remedies” only cover part of the problem. Here’s the real deal.

First, you must find out if you really do have a head lice problem. You might suspect lice because the kids are itchy, or you may spot a few little bits of something in their hair, but that isn’t a diagnosis-not a good one, anyway.

I’ve looked at thousands of heads over many years and have come to the same conclusion as many scientists: just looking for bugs in a kid’s hair is a waste of time. They’re too small, they move too quickly, they hate the light, and they can get confused with lots of other stuff caught in there.

In his experiments, Belgian scientist Jan der Maesener found that when just looking, one-third of parents who thought they had found lice hadn’t, while one in 10 parents missed lice when they were there. Scientists in Israel found that parents using combs to check for head lice were four times more likely to get the correct answer, and did it in half the time.

The message is clear: before you even think about treating for lice, you should be combing to get the correct diagnosis.

We at NITMIX have spent seven years making combing more effective and reliable in finding and removing head lice, while also making the process easier on kids and parents. NITMIX Wet Combing Aid is a special blend of essential oils in a sweet almond oil base that makes combing out head lice a realistic option for parents.

NITMIX has developed a special blend of mild essential oils in an almond oil base especially to captures every size of head louse in a slippery coating that prevents them from running away and evading your comb, while also lubricating the comb’s very fine teeth so that combing remains tangle-free. The blend of oils is critical to your success.

Using thicker products like conditioners or mayonnaise actually tends to glue the smallest lice right into the hair strands, making it more difficult to get them out. Parents usually find these products remove the adult lice, but they don’t see the baby lice jammed up in all that sticky conditioner caught up in the child’s hair.

You’ll also spend a lot less time combing this way, as you don’t need to prepare the hair by splitting it into bunches or clipping it up in sections. Once you massage the oils deep into the roots of your child’s dry hair, you can sweep the comb from root to tip and just drag them all out together.

No need to pick out individual critters-just drag them out as soon as they emerge from those little egg cases.

Every stroke of the comb will bring all sorts of confusing debris and rubbish out of the hair, and you’ll soon see the difference between lice and skin flakes, dandruff, cradle cap, and all the wind-blown bits that kids catch up in their hair. You will be amazed at how much junk you can find even in the cleanest hair.

And just wiping the comb on a tissue will show you your harvest: all sizes of lice, from the big ones waving their legs at you to the tiny ones that look more like multicolored sand grains. Many parents have never seen these critters before and are amazed at their size, and they also realize they haven’t necessarily been looking for the right things.

Once you comb them all out-the tiny eggs and freshly hatched lice along with the adults-you devastate the head lice population and are on your way to clean, healthy, lice-free hair.

We have helped kids with every kind of hair using this simple approach. Shirley Temple corks-crew curls, African American curls, Hispanic rich thick wavy curls all become easy to comb from root to tip. Just this important improvement to your combing technique will reap huge rewards in time and tears saved. Sounds too simple? Don’t you believe it!

To read how well this approach works for moms and dads all over the world follow this link to www.nitmix.com and read their stories.

In the next of our Seven HUGE Myths you will discover the menace of immature lice, we call them Stragglers.

I want to tell you a secret about treating head lice, but first let me tell you a story of a parent just like you, an ordinary mom who got caught up in an extraordinary tale of lies, more lies and lots of dollars.

She could be any mom, proud of her kid and hard working, bringing up a daughter on her own. She and her daughter are best buddies-you have to get along when it’s just the two of you against the world, right?

Well, one day mom gets a call at work from her daughter’s school. Her heart freezes-like all parents she dreads it being an accident or worse. “Your daughter has head lice” they tell her. What a relief, is that all? “You have to come and pick her up.” They continue. “And she can’t come back until she is clear.” “But I can’t leave my job, my boss won’t just let me walk out, I’ll come as soon as I can,” Mom says. “No, now” is the reply.

At this point mom feels terrible. She can see her daughter in isolation at school, waiting to be fetched as unclean, and she can’t get there to scoop her up and make everything right. If you think I’m just pulling at your heartstrings, we hear this time and time again. And it gets worse.

Mom finally works up the courage to ask her supervisor for time off, but they’re in the middle of the store and she has to tell everyone her kid has head lice. Arriving at school, she finds her daughter in tears and the principal in full flow “No nits, no lice…. Chemical treatment….. Unclean…. Infestation…. She must stay at home until you get this sorted out.. ” “But that’s insane.” Mom says. “I have to work, we need the money. We both have to live on my wages and we don’t have health insurance.”

And so starts her head lice nightmare.

She starts at her local pharmacy and explains that her daughter has lice. “We need help, and fast!” She staggers home with several expensive bottles of chemicals that make her slightly uneasy with their warnings and possible side effects, and starts treating her tearful daughter.

These foul potions smell, they sting, her kid says they hurt, and she has to open the window to catch her breath. “This can’t be right, can it?” Mom asks herself. She also took the pharmacist’s advice and bought the “Environmental Spray” or “House Treatment,” with which she sprays the furniture, the carpets and even the bedding. She was even more uneasy about this, but he’d said, “Do you think they’d make them if you didn’t need to do it?” So, yes, she just sprayed pesticide in her kid’s bed.

After she puts her child to bed she starts washing the clothes and bedding, bagging up toys and pillows to go into the garage for two weeks, and vacuuming everything in sight. All the Web sites say good moms do this.

Finally, tired and very emotional, she crawls into bed. Next day, she wakes up bleary-eyed but hopeful, and what does she find? More lice! Big fat lice, sore skin and wrecked hair.

Mom and daughter both burst into tears. Of frustration or desperation? Probably both because they have to go back to the store and buy another bottle of organo-phosphate or permethrin to pour on the kid’s now red, raw skin.

“That’s the last time you should use that.” the pharmacist warns. “Why,” asks Mom, “You said it was okay for my kid?” “Well, sure it is, but it’s only okay twice,” he replies. “What do I do if this doesn’t work?” Mom asks. The pharmacist’s reply: “Go see your doctor for the seriously poisonous poison!”

And so she tries the process again, and she gets the same result! Money is getting short and her boss wants to know where she is-”Your kid can’t be that sick, so get back in here or look for another job!”

In desperation Mom calls the school, but they state that it’s Policy to keep lice-ridden kids away, otherwise the other parents will complain. “Complain about what?” Mom insists, “My daughter caught a harmless critter from someone else, she’s the victim, not the perpetrator!” “No, stay away,” they repeat.

And so it goes in thousands of schools all over the country. Please believe me when I tell you this is a mild case of the head lice nightmare. It can go on for months, even years for some families. Parents lose their jobs and kids miss huge chunks of their education, and teachers stand in front of half-empty classrooms.

Talk about insanity, and for what? Did a kid get saved? Was a disaster avoided? No, everyone just got hysterical about a bug the size of a sesame seed that never harmed anyone. Wasps and bees and snakes and scorpions hurt thousands of kids every year, but no one ever got hurt by a head louse-sure, they’re gross, but they cause no physical harm.

Yet companies sell parents all sorts of pesticides and other poisons, and persuades health boards and pharmacies to go along with the nonsense, all because kids get a mildly irritating harmless condition that has been with humanity forever.

In short, panic over a few cooties has created a whole market that costs parents billions of dollars a year, and it’s mostly nonsense.

Remember that secret I said I would tell you? Well, here it is:

Remove them.

Did you get that? Just remove them.

No need to zap, poison, or electrocute head lice. Just gently take them off and flush them down the drain.

Allow me to explain. Head lice only ever live on the human head-they aren’t like bacteria that get inside you. Since they just rest on the surface, to “cure” your child you just have to brush them off.

Yes, the big secret is that simple. Disappointed?

Did you want a magic bullet, a secret potion to kill them all? No, you just want healthy, lice-free hair. And the best way to do that is to just remove anything that doesn’t belong in there.

Let me give you an analogy. You’re sitting outside and a tiny bug lands on your arm. What do you want to do? Do you pull out a can of poison and spray both yourself and the bug? Shoot it? Zap it with a stun gun?

Or would you just brush it off? Yes, you just brush it off.

Which option was easiest? Which causes the least risk of injury? Which is best for the environment? The simple brush-off works fine doesn’t it?

Now imagine that bug has just landed on your baby. What are you going to do, reach for the spray or gently brush it away?

So what’s different about head lice? Do you really need to reach for the chemical spray or poisonous lotion?

No, just getting head lice off is fine.

That is what we at www.nitmix.com do for you. We make removing head lice such a simple process that you need never consider poisoning lice again.

In the next of our seven HUGE myths you will learn the simple secret for getting rid of head lice without any one, even the head lice, getting hurt.. HUGE Myth 2

This is one of our most common struggles:

How do you overcome bad advice? In this instance the
advice that head lice are present and spread via the
environment.

Here is the question-

Dear Sirs,

I signed up for your email letter series. I have not yet
purchased the product…I have questions. You say that
cleaning and laundering everything is a waste of time.

That these head lice are just that, “Head Lice”.

But please explain to me then, how they can go through
a classroom at school at such an alarming rate?

My grand daughter has been suffering almost since school
started with head lice. I think mostly it is due to the
fact that her mother is not consistent in combing through
the hair, and perhaps with the cleaning too.

So when I read your letter I was stunned.

I do think the primary function in getting rid of them is
the combing…however, I don’t see if they are so hard to
get off the head, how they can go from kid to kid so easy.

I sure would appreciate your help, thank you.

Sincerely, R*********

And here is our reply

Hi R*********

Thank you for your message,

I am glad to see that you are working your way through
the evidence and making up your own mind.

Let me offer you an example

Extract from the Korea Times today.

” Removing the nits from the hair is not sufficient. Mom
also must wash (in hot water) your sister’s bed linens,
towels, clothing, hats, brushes, combs, scarves, coats,
toys, upholstered furniture and anything else she comes
into contact with. Things that cannot be washed should
be vacuumed and/or sealed in plastic bags for two weeks.”

The Concord Journal

“Even after treatment, parents should continue to check
their kids twice a day to make sure all the nits are gone,
Richards said. She also recommends that parents wash all
bedding and clothing and vacuum around the house and in
the car.

Health24.com

“To eliminate all lice and successfully prevent re infection,
wash all clothing, towels and bed linen in hot, soapy water,
and dry them in a hot dryer. You can also disinfect bedding
and other items such as hats and clothing by placing them in
a sealed plastic bag for 14 days. The nits will hatch in about
a week and die of starvation. Brushes and combs can be
disinfected by soaking them in hot, soapy water for 10 minutes.”

It is just cookie cutter journalism, they read it in one persons
paper them cut, copy-paste.

Never, ever do they cite their source for such “advice”

If you go to the correct journals via Medline or Google Scholar
and search for evidence in the professional literature for lice
in the environment you will find no evidence whatever that head
lice are present.

Try reading Richard Speare from James Cook University

http://www.jcu.edu.au/school/phtm/PHTM/hlice/environ1.htm

http://www.jcu.edu.au/school/phtm/PHTM/hlice/papers/counahan-2004.pdf

and the all time kicker

http://www.jcu.edu.au/school/phtm/PHTM/hlice/speare-2002.pdf

Head lice are head lice not house lice.

If you really want to know how they spread so easily just
watch a class of children for a day and count the number of
times they come into intimate contact with each other.

It is so common we fail to see it!

In 7 years of supplying NITMIX I have never ever had a parent
say ” Boy, all that cleaning really did the trick!”

No, it never happens.

If you want to get rid of head lice, take head lice off
children’s heads. Anyone who tries to make it more
complicated than that is quite frankly talking rubbish.

Hope that helps

Regards

John Owen

CEO NITMIX Ltd

Natural Head Lice Treatment and Prevention

Here’s a common question we get asked, ” I want to know if black American or bi-racial children get head lice? I have been told that they can’t.”

Here is our answer as best we understand it.

Yes and no!

Head lice have to be highly adapted to their environment if they are going to thrive.

This means they have to be able to scoot around easily in human hair.

The shape of hair strands differ between different racial groups and this effects head lice.

Africans living in Africa get head lice that are highly adapted to living in hair with strands that are oval in cross section. The differences are small but they are significant.

Caucasians have round hair strands and have head lice that are adapted to this shape.

In North America most head lice seem to come from the Caucasian strain and thrive in children with round hair strands, that is mainly Caucasian and Hispanic children.

There are some cases of head lice in African American children but the pool of these head lice seems to be very much smaller and so the incidence of head lice is much lower.

We get plenty of reports of bi-racial children getting head lice so we have to assume that their hair is suitable for at least one, maybe both strains of head lice to prosper.

That is how we understand the situation from 7 years of observing head lice.

All too frequently we get messages saying that children
don’t want to go to school because they have been teased
about having head lice, even that the school staff have
made children feel bad about this very common condition.

We do our best to help solve the head lice problem quickly
and permanently however we realise that we are not experts
in child behaviour and that this anxiety about head lice may
be something that needs expert help.

A friend of ours thankfully specialises in helping children
with this sort of problem and opened out eyes as to the vast
number of reason why children sometimes just don’t want to
go to school. He has kindly provided us with this article on
the subject

School Refusal, by Dr. Noel Swanson

A reader writes:

“How do I get my nine-year-old daughter to school? She seems
to have tummy aches or headaches constantly, and misses
several days of school each week. Any suggestion that she
must go and she screams and cries and seems to be genuinely
afraid of going to school. What can we do?”

Situations like this require a firm hand. Do not be tempted
to wait and hope that she will eventually go to school by
herself. If left too long, she may never go back (seriously,
it can happen!).

At the same time, recognise that her anxiety and distress
are genuine. Getting angry at her will not work.

Try to work out if her fear is about going to school (school
phobia), leaving you or home (separation anxiety), or going
into crowded public places (agoraphobia).

If it might be the first, check if she is being bullied,
teased, embarrassed, or abused at, or on the way to, school.
Work closely with the teachers to identify and deal with any
problematic situations.

Take her to the doctor for a complete physical examination.
Tell the doctor the whole story and ask him to rule out any
serious illnesses.

Once the doctor has done this, believe him! Do not chase
after ever more expensive tests. From this point onwards
your assumption is that the child is well and so should be
in school. Give her firm and confident reassurance that both
she and you will be fine when she is there. If she complains
again of being unwell you then have two options:

The first is that you insist that she go to school unless
there is clear, measurable, evidence that she is sick, for
example having a temperature, obvious diarrhoea and
vomiting, etc. Just “feeling unwell” is not enough to miss
school, after all, many adults have to go to work with
headaches or other symptoms.

The second option is to “believe” her. Since she says she is
too unwell to go to school, then clearly she is too unwell
to be up and about the house. If she is sick then she is
sick, and so she goes to bed: lights off, curtains closed,
no TV, no special snacks. Ignore her and go about your
normal daily routine. Make sure that the option of staying
home is boring. If she is not sleeping then, ideally she
should be doing some school work. Certainly there should be
no friends or visitors to entertain her.

Along with this, set up clear incentives (rewards,
privileges) for getting to school.

You must be tough and firm, but also calm, about all of
this. Be clear that you expect her to be at school, but do
not get into a fight with her about it. The goal is for her
to want to get back as quickly as possible. Once there, and
she discovers that nothing does happen to her or to you
while at school, the symptoms of depression and anxiety
should rapidly resolve.

If none of this works, or if you are concerned about a
serious depression or anxiety disorder, seek professional
help through your family doctor.

But please, don’t just hope it will go away on its own. You
need to take some decisive action.

Dr. Noel Swanson, Consultant Child Psychiatrist and author
of “The GOOD CHILD Guide”, specializes in children’s
behavioural difficulties and writes a free newsletter for
parents. He can be contacted through his website:
Good-child-guide.com

Parents looking for good head lice advice often become
confused and dis-heartened by conflicting adice on head
lice. Here is a typical example from a our correspondence
files.

—- Original Message —-
To: “NITMIX”
From: “Kim *****”
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2005 8:31 PM

I am getting more and more confused with the conflictin
“reports” I am reading from internet websites and their
“cures” for head lice.

I found live and I mean “live” large lice on my daughters
long haired stuffed toy cat after 48hours of being sealed
in an airtight plastic bag after being left in the sun
(30C plus). IF they can survive this then why can they not
survive inside the house in normal temperatures and living
conditions.

I have however taken to your advice that the only way to
remove these crtitters is to remove them manually and I
am now sure that there is more than one way to “skin a cat”.

These are good questions and they need a clear answer,
here goes!

The sealing in an air tight bag thing is nonsense.
Lice aspirate very slowly. They are less than one tenth
of one cubic millimetre in volume and only a small part
of that are ” Lungs” so a bag full of air would last them
weeks !! A louse will not suffocate in a bag.

Lice can also suspend their breathing for several hours so,
so called, smothering techniques don’t work very well either.

Lice live happily on humans in every part of the planet.
Normal temperatures range from minus 10 degrees Celsius to
over 40 degrees Celsius in different parts of the world and
lice are fine. 30 Degrees is nothing to a louse.

Head lice die when off their humans hosts because they run
out of fluids, that die of dehydration long before they run
out of food or energy. In very dry conditions a louse that
had not fed before it left the body would die relatively
quickly, probably a few hours.

A well fed louse in relatively humid air could last for a
couple of days. It all depends on the conditions.

If you can get off the hook that you need to kill lice you
will save yourself a lot of heartache. JUST TAKING THEM OFF
is fine. You don’t need to kill them which is a tough thing
to do.

Sound to me like you are on the right track and asking the
right questions.

Good luck

John Owen