Who Can Get Lice

Anyone can get head lice. Lice do not know age, income, ethnicity, if you are a boy or a girl, what you do for a living, if you have had lice before or if you have never had lice.  All they care is that you have a hair strand for them to live on. If you have even a little bit of hair you can get head lice. We have treated children as young as 1 month old and great, great grandmothers as old as 101 and all ages in between. Lice don’t live on pets. They don’t live on bird or other animals but they definitely live on humans. And they need hair to hold onto and crawl around and lay their eggs and they need a blood source because they feed on human blood every two to three hours.  Lice are like trapeze artists. They have six legs that allow them to grab a hair strand. People with short hair tend to have head lice not quite as much because it is harder for head lice to transfer from one head to another when there is not a lot of hair to grab onto and Short hair also makes it easier to detect lice when they are present.  It is a myth that people who are dirty or have dirty hair are the people that spread lice.  In fact, the opposite is true. Head lice like very clean hair. It is easy to grab onto and they can more easily climb around and lay their eggs and live nicely. And they prefer clean, healthy blood.