Wed, 14 Jun 2006

Four out of five head lice resistant to common treatment

Humans have a remarkable tendency to over use the tools they develop - "when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail". While this may lead to some laughable inefficiencies when building a shed, trying to use a screwdriver as a drill has the potential to destroy only the single tool so misused: it cannot destroy "the screwdriver" as a tool per se.

This is not so when dealing with living organism: Malathion was once the most common insecticide, but it's rapidly becoming completely impotent in dealing with several major varieties of pests. And it's happening because of our constant use for so many decades, and the theory of a gentleman you may have heard of: a chap named Charles Darwin.

There have been concerns for some time now about these practices, and not just with insecticides. We need to learn to walk a bit more softly, and not be so ready to use our big sticks at the drop of a nit.

Four out of five head lice are resistant to a common treatment used to eradicate them, finds a study of Welsh schoolchildren, published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. The most common types of treatment for head lice in the UK are organophosphates (malathion) and pyrethroids (permethrin and phenothrin), which act directly on the insect's nervous system.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

/Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time