Fairies bring nit-picking service to S.F.

SAN FRANCISCO (Map, News) - A new small business has made The City part of a national entrepreneurial trend and a forum for debate about the proper treatment of a hair-raising childhood scourge: head lice.

Los-Angeles based Hair Fairies: The Head Lice Helpers is among several new businesses operating throughout the United States offering salons staffed with professional nit-pickers. The 2238 Fillmore St. shop aims to help overwhelmed parents deal with infestations by offering lengthy combing services to remove lice and their nits, or eggs. This is the third Hair Fairies location.

“We will be the Starbucks of head lice,” entrepreneur Maria Botham said. “I figured if I could develop a method that I could guarantee and work with physicians, I would have a niche business.”

Head lice are a species of insect pest frequently passed between children, who are more likely to have head-to-head contact through play, naps and other youthful activities, according to experts.

The new service is not cheap: Hair Fairies charges $90 an hour, though it provides health insurance claim forms with a referral by Los Angeles celebrity pediatrician Peter Waldstein so parents can attempt to recoup part of the cost. Meanwhile, Botham plans to move to a national franchise model within the next few years, and has begun working with private and charter schools. She is also working on a spinoff nonprofit, Pediatric Scalp Care Specialists, to work with the public schools.

“If you really have an objection to seeing louse eggs or lice on your kids and you have the income to pay someone else to do the dirty work … it’s a win-win situation,” said Richard Pollack, a doctor with the Harvard School of Public Health.

Hair Fairies offers these services in a living-roomlike environment with brown leather and wood furniture, children’s toys and portable DVD players and video game devices to keep children occupied during the hourslong delousing process.

“When you have 5-year-old kids, you need something to entertain them,” San Francisco Hair Fairies manager Darcy Cummings said.

Where Pollack and the unrelated National Pediculosis Association beg to differ from Hair Fairies is over the sale of “natural” shampoos, conditioners, laundry additives and home sprays. Two categories, home sprays and laundry additives, are unnecessary, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: vacuuming and hot-water-and-hot-dryer laundering are sufficient to rid clothes and furniture of fallen lice. Lice die within a couple of days when removed from a human host, and some experts recommend simply plastic-bagging clothing and linens for two weeks to kill the insects.

As for shampoos, opinion differs. Studies have shown some lice are becoming resistant to the main ingredients in commercial pesticide shampoos, such as Rid and Nix. If they fail, Pollack, who has received funding from lice-shampoo companies, recommends the prescription-strength malathion, found in Ovide. An even stronger chemical, lindane, is banned in California.

The NPA, concerned about the pesticides in all these options, advocates diligent nit-picking alone. The group encourages parents to comb their children’s hair regularly to check for bugs before they get out of hand.

Both are skeptical of the efficacy of “natural” shampoos, such as the one sold by Hair Fairies for $22.07 along with a $15.56 cream designed to make nit removal easier. The claims made for these products on www.hairfairies.com are extensive: it says the shampoo “works to damage the nervous system of the bug. This makes it difficult for the bug to reproduce,” the traditional methodology of pesticide shampoos. The site claims the cream “loosens the glue inside the egg,” something Pollack said is impossible with any chemical compound currently known to science, though he said conditioners in general make louse-combing easier.

He added that the claim of “natural” as a synonym for “effective yet harmless” is misleading — pyrethrins, a chemical used in some of the traditional pesticide shampoos he advocates, are made from natural chrysanthemum extract.

“We haven’t seen any scientific studies that support some of these claims,” NPA president Deborah Altschuler said. “Once you start using different treatments — on children — with no safety studies … We think that the public health departments need to set some standards.”

Botham said the products are designed to supplement the service, and that she developed them after perfecting her manual removal method. She said she helped test the products for efficacy and had been using them since 2002. The manufacturer, TCI Laboratories in Southern California, said it does no on-site efficacy testing of its products, and that all its products are cosmetic-grade and not medical-grade. They have not been third-party tested.

“A lot of people really want the natural, organic approach. There’s a big movement against toxic products,” Botham said. “We use them while we’re doing the combing as well, and we want people to use them between treatments.”

For San Francisco parents, it remains to be seen how the new service will interact with public school requirements; Botham has said it is a goal of hers to encourage schools to become educated about lice. The San Francisco Unified School District requires that children with lice be kept out of school, and that parents show the school their empty bottle of pesticide shampoo when the child returns, spokeswoman Heidi Anderson said. The district does not track incidents of head lice among students.

All about lice

» Also called Pediculus humanus capitis, head lice are parasitic insects found on the heads of people.

» Personal hygiene or cleanliness in the home or school has nothing to do with getting head lice.

» There are three forms of lice: the egg (also called a nit), the nymph and the adult.

» Nits take about one week to hatch. Eggs that are likely to hatch are usually located within one-quarter of an inch of the scalp.

» Adult lice can live up to 30 days on a person’s head. To live, adult lice need to feed on blood. If the louse falls off a person, it dies within 2 days.

» They are most commonly found on the scalp, behind the ears and near the neckline at the back of the neck.

» Head-to-head contact is the most common way of transmitting lice.

- Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

kwilliamson@examiner.com

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