Clayton conducted the study with Brad Goates, a University of Utah medical student who wrote his master's thesis about the LouseBuster; Joseph Atkin, Kevin Wilding, Kurtis Birch and Michael Cottam, all of whom worked in Clayton's lab as undergraduates; and Sarah Bush, who is Clayton's wife and co-directs the Center for Alternate Strategies of Parasite Removal, a state-funded Center of Excellence working to commercialize the LouseBuster. Clayton, Atkin and Wilding co-invented the device.
How Hot-Air Treatments for Lice Were Studied
"The cool thing about the machine is, it works unlike many other treatments that haven't been rigorously tested," Clayton says. "It came out of basic research, completely unplanned."
Clayton's research focuses on birds and the lice that infest them. But when he moved to the University of Utah in 1996, he couldn't keep lice alive on laboratory birds because Utah's air was too dry. He had to humidify bird rooms to keep lice alive.
About the same time, his two children Mimi and Roger, now 13 and 15, respectively got head lice, "and we wondered if there was a way to kill head lice by drying them out," Clayton says. "We started trying different methods of desiccation using hot air like conventional hair dryers, but those didn't work well."
In the new study, the researchers tested six ways of applying hot air to children's lice-infested scalps. The tests were conducted during 2001-2005 on 169 infested children who were solicited for the study by flyers distributed in dozens of Salt Lake Valley schools. The study was approved by the university's Institutional Review Board, which reviews research i
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6-Nov-2006