LouseBuster uses heated air to dry out lice and kill them and their eggs. Hide caption courtesy of LouseBuster
When your child gets lice, there’s bound to be a certain amount of panic and even despair in the home. But one biologist is determined to find a better way to rid our homes of the common pest.
The lice are harmless, but teacher Sheri Nacht knows how frustrating they can be for parents. Nacht teaches kindergarten in Santa Cruz, California. Last winter, she discovered she had lice, something she had never had since she was a child. “It was a nightmare,” Nacht says.
“I asked the nurse to come and check the whole class,” she said. “We found out there was another little girl at the school with lice, so they sent out a letter just saying there were people at the school with lice and they needed to check their hair.”
“I did this for three weeks straight: brushing my hair, washing it, and then every other night I’d have a friend brush my hair,” she said. “It was so hard to get rid of the hair that I wasn’t even sure it was completely gone.”
Even lice researchers with PhDs in entomology are helpless when faced with live, reproductive lice on a child’s head.
“My wife and I can’t get rid of lice,” says Dale Clayton, a University of Utah coevolution and parasite expert who has been studying lice for decades. “I’m supposed to be an expert on lice — there aren’t that many of them in the world, by the way — and I had no idea how to get rid of lice.”
When Clayton’s children were little, like millions of other children, they were infested with lice, and Clayton spent weeks combing, plucking, and washing his hair to get rid of the lice.
“Even then, it was known that lice were becoming resistant to many of the shampoos sold in drugstores, grocery stores, etc.,” Clayton said, so he set out to create a better lice trap.
“The first attempt was to take pigeon lice – I’m not making this up – and put them in my hair and then blow them out with my mother’s hat blower to see if that would work – kill them,” he said.
Of course not. But there’s one thing you should know about Clayton: He’s not crazy — he just knows a lot about lice. For example, he knew that pigeon lice can’t survive and reproduce on a human head.
So when Clayton moved his lab from Oxford, England, to Utah and his lice started dying, he had second thoughts.
“It’s pretty dry here,” he said, “and our birds just can’t survive because of the lice, and we couldn’t figure out why for months.”
Then it hit him: The sudden change in climate would kill lice, which get most of their moisture from the air. If you sucked all the water out of a louse, you would dry it out, dehydrate it, and eventually kill it.
A pile of dead lice might not have been of much use to Clayton’s research, but as a parent tired of being nagged, he saw an opportunity: He imagined creating a machine that could kill those pesky little insects by the thousands.
“We tried a lot of different ways to dry out the lice,” he said. He tried hair dryers, hair extractors, handheld dryers; he tried the wall-mounted handheld dryers you often see in bathrooms; he even tried blowing leaves.
“At one point, we vaccinated the kids against lice — just the male ones, so they couldn’t reproduce — and then took them to the lab to be treated,” Clayton said. “They’re in college now, but they love telling the story and scaring their friends.”
Eventually, he and a team of engineers came up with the LouseBuster. It’s like an old canister vacuum, but instead of sucking in air, it blows it out hot. It has a nozzle on the end that looks a bit like a big plastic porcupine, with 28 tiny nozzles that direct air along the top of your head.
The LouseBuster treatment takes about half an hour and feels like a warming scalp massage. It kills lice and their eggs (also known as nits). Sheri Nacht said it may have also brought her back to sanity.
“It’s amazing. It’s amazing because there’s no other way to kill these eggs,” she said. “If you can’t kill the eggs and you can’t find them all, you have to start over.”
Today, Clayton’s company sells the LouseBuster to nurses, schools, and hospitals, and rents it to hair salons like Nitless Noggins and Hair Whisperers. Clayton doubted his invention would make him rich, but he says it at least scratched his entrepreneurial itch.
The audio recording of this story, as well as the earlier web version, incorrectly identifies one of the salons that rented LouseBuster. They are Hair Whispers, not Hair Fairies.