Treatment eliminates lice infestations
The warning of the approach o f unwanted “guests” came via a phone call. When Sandra Gomez heard her daughter’s classmate had lice, she knew it was only a matter of time before it would intrude into her home, too.
“For kids that age, it’s very easy for lice to spread from head-to-head contact,” says Gomez, whose daughter, Sophie, was five-and-a-half and attending kindergarten in 2013.
“They hug each other, press their heads together. Even though my daughter’s long hair was always clipped back in a ponytail, she ended up with a lot of lice. The areas behind her ears were quite irritated and you could clearly see the tiny eggs on her scalp.”
As insect parasites that feed on human blood by biting the scalp, lice attach eggs to hair shafts with a water-insoluble adhesive. Pesticide-based treatments are used to address the problem. But the repeated use of these treatments led to a new generation of super lice that are immune to the key ingredient in most head-lice treatments.
More than 97 per cent of these hard-to-kill pests were found, in a study, to have the gene that makes them resistant to pesticides.
Infestations typically peak during the summer and fall; in the past year, one in every 14 Canadian households with children had at least one case of head lice.
And when kids come home with head lice, everyone in the household is at risk. Gomez ended up with lice as well. She purchased pesticide-based products for both herself and her daughter to treat the problem. But they didn’t work.
Then she decided to try a product called NYDA.
“A friend of mine knew someone who used NYDA and highly recommended it. It was new in Canada back then and so not very wellknown,” says Gomez.
“It was easy to apply and we noticed results right away after the first treatment, but did a second one after seven days just to be on the safe side.”
With a proven efficacy rate between 97 and 100 per cent, NYDA is a safe and effective pesticide-free treatment that starts killing lice, larvae and eggs through suffocation in under a minute.
Its silicone solution does the job so thoroughly that there is no risk of a recurring infestation, the company says.
Even super lice do not develop immunity to the dimeticone-based solution in NYDA.
Dimeticone is also found in many infant medicines, cosmetics and hair products.
Reimbursed by most provincial, federal and private health plans, NYDA is sold without a prescription at drugstore pharmacy counters.
Ask your pharmacist, public health nurse or doctor about it.