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After you have treated your family for lice, you likely want to ensure that all of the lice everywhere are dead. When you start to consider the days leading up to the discovery of the infestation, you might recall how often your family was in the car and be concerned with whether can you get lice from a leather car seat or can lice live in a car? If so, you’re probably wondering if you should get rid of lice in the car. The short answer is that it is likely unnecessary as lice do not like to leave the perfect environment of the human head to go to a place like a car or a furniture where they will starve without their food (human blood). Here are 3 steps you can take and one step you should not take if you are worried about head lice in your car:
WIPING OFF YOUR CAR SEATS AND SURFACES…LEATHER OR CLOTH
You’ll be relieved to know that lice do not live off of the head for more than 24-36 hours. Because of this, if you are not planning on driving in the next couple of days, any lice that may have been on the car seats will be dead. If you are going to be using your car and are very concerned with lice car seats transferring to your family, you can wipe off leather seats with a damp cloth. With cloth seats, you can take a hand broom and sweep them clean.
VACUUM CLEAN YOUR CAR
Head lice very rarely transfer from an object, like a car seat, to the human head. However, if you are determined to do a thorough lice cleaning, a quick trip to the car wash could help provide peace of mind. Vacuuming the seats and carpeting will also be effective at getting rid of any bugs that may have been hitching a ride.
STICKY TAPE ROLLER
Another option if you prefer not to go to the car wash to do a thorough head lice cleaning of your car is to use sticky tape or a lint roller to roll the seats. Simply run the roller over the fabric in your car and that will grab any bugs that you see. Also if an egg happened to be knocked off the head, the roller will clean those up as well. Note though that if an egg were to fall out of the hair, it cannot reattach to the hair.
APPLY HEAD LICE PESTICIDES TO THE CAR SEATS
Definitely do not spray car seats with an insecticide, especially preventatively, as that is ineffective and potentially toxic in a closed car. Prevention can be helpful though ON THE HEAD so after lice treatment, the use of a head lice repellent that is a proven lice treatment product can make the hair undesirable to any live bugs that may still be crawling around and lower the chances of being infested. It is important to know that head lice are primarily transmitted directly from one person’s head to another so if you are alone in the car, lice repellent will likely be overkill.
HEAD LICE IN CAR FAQs
While researching how to get rid of lice in the car, with the knowledge that lice will die naturally without cleaning the car, you may have some additional questions:
