Lice more prevailent?

[CloudySue]

We had an extraordinarily large amt of lice cases come to camp this year. Fortunately we started with a contracted lice company who has been taking care of checks and initial treatments, so we have been able to handle and manage these cases well. (Many of these cases are international and sending campers home is not an option nor is it our policy.)

My question to all of you is, have any of you seem an uptick in the number of active cases coming into camp this year? We've seen them come from the US and abroad, so I'm wondering if lice are on the rise across the board. We had a couple of cases in other years, but nothing close to this!

[Romy87]

Thankfully, we have not! I'm in Canada with a small number of international campers (US, China, Japan, Mexico) but we have only detected 3 cases on arrival out of about 500 campers so far this summer.

[BatcampRN]

We have also seen a lot of lice this summer. Also both internationals and US residents. We have around 300 boys. All but 2 of the cases were with the youngest boys and the staff in that unit.

What is your preferred method to treat? Do you have the campers counselor help or do you as the RN do the treatments?

We typically use RID if we see lice or it is especially bad with lots of nits. If they are just a few nits we will use cetaphil.

[Alex Egan, LPN, EMT-B]

We have only had one case at my new camp this year. However the lice were totally un hindered by rid/Nix. We used natroba and seems that that was successful.