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Hair
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Wet Combing More Effective for Detecting Head Lice
than Traditional Visual Inspection
Head lice are minute, parasitic insects that live in hair. They easily
spread from person to person, especially among children at school or
in day care, and they are responsible for many school absences. Because
lice are barely visible, finding lice eggs, called nits, is the easier
way to detect an infestation. These tiny, white flecks cling to hair
shafts. Researchers at Belgium’s Ghent University recently found
that carefully sweeping a fine-toothed comb through wet, conditioned
hair is more effective for detecting lice than the traditional, dry-scalp
visual inspection.
The study, published in the British Medical Journal, compared
the two methods on 224 school children. Two trained teams independently
examined the students: one using the wet comb technique, the other using
the visual test. Wet combing found lice in 49 children, while the visual
test only detected 32 of these cases. In addition, the traditional inspection
mistakenly identified 14 uninfected children as having lice.
The results suggest that compared to traditional, visual inspection,
wet combing would allow for more accurate head lice detection, meaning
more infestations detected before they can spread, and fewer non-infested
children receiving unnecessary treatment with insecticides.
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