Lice, Lice and more Lice!

Do you have a child? Does your child have long hair? Are you itchy?

I have been visiting preschools to introduce them to this service and they are all telling me that more than asthma, lice is their main concern. It’s not that they don’t want to help children with asthma but that lice is a nuisance that is irritating them right now!

Parents and non parents with lice should be aware that the permethrin based treatments are a pesticide with mild neurotoxins that are not recommended for repeat use. But kids with long hair are getting lice repeatedly and annually nowadays.

I recommend combing them out with a lice comb and a lot of conditioner in the bath daily for 2 weeks.

Also, as the janitorial services of schools and preschools grapple with how to control the infestation from a facility perspective, they are looking at steam as a way of killing bugs that are located in the rooms. They are aware that the facility also needs treatment, even though lice usually jumps from one head to the next. It is still possible for the bugs to survive temporarily between hosts in a given location.

Dry-vapor is a safe and non-toxic way of eradicating any pest, including lice. Wash bedding and couch throws and us dry-vapor to steam clean couches and carpets just to make sure that you are covering all your bases.

How to Clean a Room for Asthma

I remember I had a neighbor whose kids were wheezing at night. She was so distraught and was always vacuuming and spending money on expensive equipment like a high end hepa vacuum cleaner, air filter, containers for the (hundreds of) stuffed animals they owned.

I would recommend to get rid of all the stuffies but now I know that’s not necessary. Stuffies can be treated too. First of all, vacuuming every day barely puts a dent in the dust mite population. You need to us a dry-vapor cleaner if you want to kill the entire population and keep the population down for a while. A cheap steam cleaner will not do a good job. It may leave enough of a population surviving that you will find a week later, the reaction is back. I am not arguing this just because of my service. It’s the other way around. I provide this service because it really works and one rental every three months is better than daily vacuuming or steaming with a cheep steam cleaner or worse, using a wet-vac extraction cleaner. Studies show that extraction only takes out about 2/3 of the population and then leaves enough moisture to allow the remaining 1/3 to multiply to a larger population than you had to begin with.

So start with vacuuming, then steam with a dry-vapor cleaner  all carpeted and not carpeted flooring, upholstered and unupholstered furniture. Take blankets and pillows, stuffed animals and unwashable fabric items and put them in the dryer. Stuffies will not get ruined in the dryer. They won’t even lose their softness (most of them anyway) like they do when you wash them first.

You might want to wash your stuffies initially as the dryer will kill the dust mites and mold but will not take away the debris. If you wash your stuffies, wash them with only cold water, let them air dry and fluff them up before you put them in the dryer for best results. This goes for bedding too. You don’t need to wash your bedding every night but putting them through the dryer more frequently than you would wash them helps remove the moisture and kills existing mites so that they cannot reproduce and repopulate to the point where they cause a severe allergic reaction.

After dry-vapor treatment and dryer treatment of the room, you can maintain with frequent vacuuming with a high quality Hepa vacuum cleaner and regular dryer visits for your stuffies. It only takes one dry-vapor treatment of your carpet every 3 months to keep the population in the carpet down to near zero. The dry vapor cleaner can also be used to remove mold on walls and window sills but good circulation is necessary to maintain a mold free environment. Also, mold repellent in paint wears off after 5 years so repainting walls with mold repellent every 5 years helps keep mold under control.

The Hazards of Bleach

Aside from the fact that when mixed with ammonia it can become a highly corrosive agent that can burn through skin, or at a different ratio, be used as an explosive, there are other reasons NOT to use bleach.

Bleach can cause respiratory difficulties, headaches, skin burns, loss of consciousness, and vomiting. According the the Material Safety Data Sheet for bleach”Medical conditions that may be aggravated by exposure to high concentrations of vapor or mist: heart conditions or chronic respiratory problems such as asthma, emphysema, chronic bronchitis or obstructive lung disease.” Also, use in conjunction with other cleaning solutions can prove to be very dangerous.

Furthermore, using bleach to disinfect some microbes from clean, hard nonporous surfaces is possible but most people use it wrong. Preschools are instructed to use 1 part regular household bleach to 9 parts water and leave it on for 1 minute. This contradicts with what is stated on the Clorox bleach website where longer application times are recommended.

First, it must be noted that bleach does not disinfect a dirty surface. The surface must already be washed of organic matter before using the bleach to disinfect. Secondly, the amount of time that one should leave the solution on a non-porous hard surface is not 1 minutes but differ depending on the contaminant. According to this efficacy review conducted by the EPA for Clorox brand Super Bleach, the leave on time, is 2 minutes for Staph, 2 minutes for e-choli, and 10 minutes for Clostridium Dificile. In addition, they expect you to wipe or mop so that the surface is thoroughly wet for that period of time. A sprintz won’t do it.

Also, reviewing various EPA action for the use of Sodium Hypochlorite (the active ingredient in bleach) there are various degrees of efficacy and dilution for hospital use when used as a virucide (to kill viruses) and fungicide (to kill mold and other fungi). Furthermore, many of these recommendations involved longer standing time and the use in combination with other chemicals.

The most dramatic is the EPA recommendation for the use of bleach during 2001 to neutralize Anthrax, a bacterium. The epa recommended a solution of 1 part bleach to 1 part vinegar to 8 parts water. Considering the combination of bleach with vinegar is exactly what burns human flesh, you can see that the use of bleach alone does not make it an all around disinfectant as one would imagine. Furthermore, this solution was used, spraying to cover the entire surface repeatedly and kept wet for over 60 minutes, an entire hour!

It is not that bleach doesn’t have disinfecting properties, but the long list of organisms on the page that Clorox company links to titled “Facts about Bleach” misleads the reader into believing that bleach is a disinfectant for all of these germs when in fact it is not, especially not at the 1 minute leave on instruction that preschools are trained to use. Even on this page, you will see that for some of these items 10 minutes is recommended. Also, for many items on the list, no time is recommended because, although bleach can kill them, there is no proven efficacy level or leave on time available. Simply put, bleach is not an EPA disinfectant for those items therefore, the degree of efficacy is not approved by the government.

Finally, the greatest danger in trusting bleach as your all around disinfectant is that we are fooled into believing a solution of bleach spritzed for one minute than wiped off takes care of the most resilient and deadly of microbes when in fact, just the opposite is true.

Parents Want Preschools to Use Dry-Vapor

Over the past year, several customers have asked me to visit preschools to convince them of the need to use a dry-vapor cleaner. They were parents with small children who have asthma or have friends who have children with asthma.  They felt that given the amount of time that their children spend at the preschools it is pertinent that the preschools do something to keep their environment free of asthma irritants such as mold and dust mites.

Unfortunately asthma and allergies often go hand in hand. Using a dry vapor cleaning system can help with both. Thanks to these parents I have created a certificate program for preschools who use Steam it Gone rental service periodically to rid their facility of asthma and allergy irritants. The Ladybug XL2300 that I rent also has a patented Swiss technology called TANCS™ that qualifies these machines as a Disinfecting Device by EPA standards and has the registration number to prove it.