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Where do lice come from?

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How to Remove Lice and Nits

You have two problems.

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Head Lice Re-Infestation

Where do lice come from?

This is really one of the most common questions people ask first when they are confronted with head lice in their family. "How did we get LICE?" you wonder. And usually the first things people try to figure out is which friend gave the lice to you in the first place.

But the answer is almost impossible to find out. Why?

Because head lice is one of those things that people don't talk about. No one wants to let other people know that they have lice. There is such a negative social stigma with the problem that people are very embarrased to reveal they are fighting the problem, even to family members.So where did the lice come from? They could have come from anywhere and from anyone. Was it from the child in the class who seems to have the dirtiest clothes and hair all the time? Cleanliness has nothing to do with it. Truth be told, head lice actually prefer clean heads. One thing we do know is that lice do not jump or fly. They infest a new head by crawling onto the head. This usually happens with head-to-head contact. With children, such contact is suprisingly frequent and wide-spread. There are other ways of lice infestation as well. Shared brushes. Shared clothing such as jackets or hats. Or maybe two jackets, hats or scarves hung next to each other on a rack. Lice also can transfer from one person to another using furniture such as a chair or couch. Cars, busses, theater seats, etc. can also be sources of infestation.Here is another situation most people don't consider...Every human loses dozens of hairs every day. Lice lay their eggs (called nits) on human hairs. When someone with lice loses hairs, some of those hairs will contain nits. Nits can take up to 10 days to hatch. If a hair with a nit is in a couch, chair, car seat, theater seat, etc., it can hatch many days later and the baby louse (nymph) can crawl up to where it can climb on the next human head that passes by. Some people wonder if lice are spread by animals. They are not. Head lice are a human pest.

Because there are so many ways and places available for lice to spread, and because people are so reluctant to talk about their head lice problem it is almost impossible to find out where the lice came from. All you can know is that they came from another person. They have been transferred from one person to another for thousands of years and it looks like the problem is not going away anytime soon.