RESEARCH ARTICLE
Parental and Child Attitudes Towards Pediculosis are a Major Cause Of Reinfection
Deon V. Canyon*, Chauncey Canyon, Sami Milani
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2014Volume: 8
First Page: 24
Last Page: 28
Publisher ID: TODJ-8-24
DOI: 10.2174/1874372201408010024
Article History:
Received Date: 1/02/2014Revision Received Date: 3/04/2014
Acceptance Date: 3/04/2014
Electronic publication date: 18/4/2014
Collection year: 2014
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Pediculosis can elicit considerable emotional distress in the infected and their carers, but the role of attitude in head lice reinfection has not been explored. Failure of head lice control is often attributed to insecticide resistance because human aspects of reinfestation are unknown. This study collected data from 128 teenagers with a history of pediculosis to retrospectively explore attitudes towards head lice. One third of female and two thirds of male teenagers were unconcerned about having head lice. One fifth of parents did nothing about their child’s head lice infections, while a few male students did not inform their parents when they had pediculosis. This is the first study on the prevalence of human lice carriers who are a primary cause of head lice reinfection. Medical and public health professions need to understand the social reasons for the failure of insecticide-based head lice control.
