Chances are if your child isn’t school-age yet, you probably don’t think of head lice as a concern. But after your children start school, you may just have your first experience with the disgusting yet incredibly common affliction.

An estimated 12 million cases of head lice are diagnosed in the United States each year. While health experts stress that lice is harmless, it’s certainly a huge nuisance with a serious ick factor.

So is there anything you can do to prevent your child from getting lice – especially if you’re sending them off to summer camp or preparing for back -to-school? The verdict is still out on that, but there are some possible lice-prevention products on the market.

Tea tree oil shampoo – available in drug/grocery stores –  reportedly repels lice.

Also, Fairy Tales Hair Care makes Rosemary Repel preventative shampoo and other hair products that contain natural ingredients that lice reportedly don’t like.

Fairy Tales Hair Care even has an iPhone app, called Facts of Lice, that notifies you of any lice outbreaks in your area and tells you how to treat and prevent head lice.

Read more about this mom’s attempt to prevent my kids from getting lice in my newspaper column here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 21st, 2012 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Health/Safety, Healthcare, Organic Child, Parenting News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.