It’s a problem almost every parent has to deal with — even if they don’t admit it. Their daughter’s beautiful long hair has been infested by head lice. And while their child suffers the physical torture the tiny insects bring, their parents battle with the guilt and the shame. “It’s a terrible shock for a parent,” says Amanda Coplans, whose daughter Dani’s head played host to head lice and their eggs, or nits, for almost 11 years.
“It became an obsession,” Coplans says. “Every night Dani would sit at my feet and I would go through her hair. She was a typical stroppy teenager and this made things even worse.” Coplans, who was then a photographer, was not alone. Her friends Gill Newton and Lillan Osterberg-Webb had daughters who suffered too. “Jessica had them a couple of times and it was awful,” Newton says. “Girls get them far more than boys because when they play they cuddle a lot and the lice crawl from one head to another.”
The head louse (Pediculus humanus capitis) cannot hop, jump or fly and once on a scalp it heads for the neck or behind the ears. Here it injects an anaesthetic into its victim’s scalp before feeding on their blood every three hours. The females, which live for about 30 days, lay five or six eggs a day and attach them to the base of a hair using a strong, saliva-based glue. The eggs hatch after ten days and the cycle starts again. Most children are allergic to the anaesthetic and the glue and this causes terrible itching.
A mother can be both a saviour and a curse, unwittingly passing the lice back to their children. “I always got them too,” Coplans says. But her son, Seb, was never afflicted.
But if the itching and the stigma were bad, the treatment was far, far worse. Parents spend £30 million a year trying to kill head lice and most of that money goes on insecticides. The most common is malathion, a controversial organophosphate used in sheep dips. It has been linked to brain damage and miscarriage, and is even thought to mutate DNA.
“It was all horrendous stuff,” says Dani, whose nits did not interfere with her success as a young model and star of many television commercials. “The chemicals were so powerful that my eyes would sting, I could hardly breathe and the smell was disgusting. I was usually sick.” Bug busting, or applying conditioner through the victim’s wet hair with a special fine comb, was a chemical-free tactic but rarely removed all the eggs. Nothing worked for Dani until one day Osterberg-Webb handed her a bottle and said: “Try this.” “It was an aromatherapy treatment I had made up for my daughter, Corenza,” says Ossterberg, a deep-tissue masseuse and aromatherapist. “It was a blend of eucalyptus, rosemary, lavender, geranium and tea tree oils in an almond carrier oil. I spent a long time experimenting before I got it right. Lavender is an antiseptic and very good for the skin; eucalyptus has cleansing properties and kills bacteria; geranium soothes the skin; rosemary is very good for hair and stimulates the scalp; and tea tree oil is a powerful antiseptic and repellent.”
It worked and Dani was nit-free for the first time in her memory. “I told Mum that they should bottle it and sell it.” She agreed and in 1998 the three mums started a business producing the solution now known as Nitty Gritty.
“We were too old to start a business,” says Coplans, who has been in a wheelchair for 30 years after an accident. “We had no ambition and no motivation.” That hasn’t held them back. Nitty Gritty started as a mail-order business but is now sold at hundreds of independent chemists and hairdressing salons.
Other widely available head lice treatments that do not have insecticides include Biz Niz Conditioner, available through Lemon Burst (01273 703461), or Tesco; Nice’n Clear, which can be bought at Sainsbury’s Pharmacies; and Boots Alternatives Children’s Head Lice Removal Kit, which combines a fine-toothed nit comb with a conditioner. All these products are fully effective only when used with an approved nit comb.
Changes were made to the Nitty Gritty recipe and the women switched the carrier oil to grapeseed. “We wanted something that kids with nut allergies could use and grapeseed was recommended by an expert. He told us that it suffocated the lice in the same way that an oil slick kills seabirds,” says Newton, a former Body Shop manager.
As demand grew, they switched production from the bathroom in Osterberg-Webb’s West London flat to FPI, a specialist manufacturer in Stamford, Lincolnshire. “After a year they suggested we add neem oil,” Newton says. “It comes from a foul-smelling tree in Asia that not even locusts will attack. Its oil, seeds and leaves are used to treat anything from toothache to diabetes.”
Its effect on head lice was dramatic. “At that time you had to apply Nitty Gritty twice: once to get rid of the lice and ten days later to attack the newly-hatched eggs. But neem seemed to weaken the glue and loosen the eggs. Mums were telling us that one dose would get rid of both lice and nits.” They also used it to develop a lice-repellent spray that smells sweet to little girls but foul to the average louse.
Then disaster struck. The Medicines Control Agency (MCA) — now the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency — told them to stop claiming that Nitty Gritty killed head lice. “They said that because we hadn’t been through clinical trials and didn’t have a licence we could not make medical claims,” Coplans says. Unlike conventional drugs, herbal treatments do not undergo clinical trials because the potency of the oils changes from year to year in much the same way as a wine vintage. “But we had letters from parents telling us it worked,” she adds.
Jonathan Ross, the broadcaster, who used it to treat his family’s nits, told the two million listeners to his Saturday morning Radio 2 show how good it was. Nitty Gritty was even sent to 10 Downing Street. But the MCA wouldn’t budge.
Finally, the MCA came up with a solution. “They said that because with every order we send out a nit comb, which is technically a medical device, we should be licensed by the Medical Devices Agency.” The MDA granted the licence and Nitty Gritty was back on track, claiming not that it kills lice but that it aids their removal. It was one of the first aromatherapy products to gain the CE (European Union approval) mark.
Fame spread far and wide. An Argentine company that makes a revolutionary nit comb chose Nitty Gritty as its sole UK distributor. “It’s made of tempered steel and the teeth are very long and close together,” Coplans says. “They also have spiral micro-grooving that helps them get underneath every egg.”
Despite setbacks such as two fires at their factory last year, the women persevered. “We had a call from the Prescriptions Pricing Agency (PPA), which is part of the Department of Health,” Coplans says. “A GP had prescribed Nitty Gritty but the PPA would not pay for it because it did not appear on the Drug Tariff. They asked for information about the treatment and then suggested we applied to be on the Drug Tariff.” The women jumped at the chance. Their Nitty Gritty NitFree comb is now available on prescription and they expect the brew they once made in a bathtub to be close behind, making it one of the first aromatherapy head lice solutions to be available on prescription.
The biggest reward for Coplans, Newton and Osterberg-Webb is reassuring parents. “At four o’clock every afternoon the phones start ringing as kids come home from school with nits,” Newton says. “First-time mums are often frantic. We tell them that it’s no big deal.”
www.nittygritty.co.uk
