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溫熱的乾燥風可以殺死頭蝨與蟲卵
治療過程也像是熱烘烘的頭皮按摩Spa
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Copyright ©2012
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Heard on All Things
Considered
April 9, 2012 - ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Our next story is about lice, and
one biologist's mission to rid his home of them. Our tale begins with lice
doing what they were born to do - infest. Here's NPR's Steve Henn.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: When your kids
are infested
with head lice, a certain amount of panic, even desperation, can spread through a house. These bugs
are basically harmless, but Sheri Nacht still knows too well the knot that can
form in the pit of a parent's stomach讓父母的胃都糾結了 at the sight of a louse. Sheri's a kindergarten
teacher幼稚園老師 in Santa
Cruz. This winter...
SHERI NACHT: I figured out that I
had lice myself, which I haven't had since I was a child. It was a total nightmare噩夢.
HENN: Did you have to - you know, like,
send a letter home to parents and explain that not only was someone in the
class infested but in fact, it was you?
NACHT: I had the nurse come
down and check my whole class. We found out that there was another little
girl who had lice, so they went ahead and sent the letter. And it's just
a letter saying somebody in the school has lice, and make sure to check
your hair.
HENN: Even if it didn't name names,
Sheri was mortified羞愧/丟臉.
NACHT: I combed用扁平梳子去梳頭(非扁平梳子要用brush這個字) and combed, and shampooed and combed for three
weeks, and had a friend combing my hair every other night. And we just - it was
very difficult to get rid of, and I wasn't sure that I was done with it.
HENN: Turns out, she wasn't. And
even researchers who study lice for a living, Ph.D.s in entomology昆蟲學, can become helpless
when faced with a live, fertile很會生的 louse loose on the scalp在頭皮上自由行動 of their child.
DALE CLAYTON: My wife and I couldn't
get rid of the head lice.
HENN: Dale Clayton studies co-evolution共同進化 and parasites寄生蟲 at the
University of Utah. He's been doing research on lice for decades.
CLAYTON: And here I am, supposed to
be an expert on lice - and there are not many of us in the world,
by the way. ..
CLAYTON: ...completely clueless完全摸不著頭緒 about how to get rid of human
head lice.
HENN: When his kids were little,
they - like millions of others - got it. And he spent weeks combing and picking
and shampooing.
CLAYTON: Even then, it was already
pretty well known that lice were evolving
resistance對…免疫(發展出抵抗力) to many of the shampoos that are available in drugstores
and grocery stores and so on.
HENN: So it became Dale Clayton's mission
to build a better louse trap.
CLAYTON: The first attempt was to
take pigeon lice長在鴿子身上的蝨子 - and I'm not making this up我是說真的(不是瞎編唬人的) - and put them in my hair, and then put on my mother's bonnet hair dryer美容院使用的頭罩式吹風機.
CLAYTON: ...and look to see if it had any effect
on them有沒有效果, if it
killed them.
HENN: It didn't. First thing you
should know about Dale Clayton is he is not, in fact, crazy. But he does know a
lot about lice. For example, he knew that pigeon lice could never survive存活 and breed繁殖 on a human head. He also
knew something else - that sudden changes in climate氣候的突然改變 can kill these bugs.
When he moved his lab to Utah猶他州, from Oxford in England,
something very bad happened.
CLAYTON: It's quite arid異常乾燥 here. We couldn't keep lice
alive on our birds, and we couldn't figure out why for a few months.
HENN: Turns out, lice get most of
their
moisture from the air. If you suck all the moisture out of a louse,
you can dry it out, you can desiccate變乾/脫水 it; you can kill it.
Now, a bunch of dead lice may have
been bad for Dale Clayton's research, but as a parent who was sick of nitpicking挑頭蝨(引申為吹毛求疵或是挑剔), he saw an opportunity. He imagined building a
machine that could kill these annoying令人討厭的, little bugs by the thousands.
CLAYTON: We tried a bunch of
different approaches to drying out lice.
HENN: He tried lots of different hair
dryers - bonnets from beauty parlors and handhelds手持式吹風機; he tried those wall-mounted hand blowers壁掛式吹風機 you see in bathrooms.
CLAYTON: We even tried a leaf blower吹落葉機(國外常見工人拿來吹落葉的機器).
HENN: Dale Clayton became a bit obsessed走火入魔.
CLAYTON: At one point, we infested
my kids with head lice - male lice only, so they couldn't breed
- and treated them in the lab. They're in college now, but they like to tell
that story to shock their friends.
HENN: Eventually, he and a team of
engineers built the LouseBuster. It looks a little bit like your grandmother's
old canister
vacuum cleaner家用的拖曳式吸塵器
but instead of sucking air in, it blows hot air out. On the end of it, there's
an attachment接上一個物件 that looks a bit like an
overgrown, plastic porcupine長滿了刺的豪豬 - 28 little nozzles送風口 that direct air along the top of a scalp.
Getting treated with a LouseBuster
takes about half an hour, and it feels a bit like a heated head massage.
NACHT: And that was it.
HENN: It kills lice, and it kills
their eggs
- the nits卵或是幼蟲.
NACHT: It's magic. It's amazing
because nothing else kills the eggs.
HENN: Sheri Nacht says it may also have saved her
sanity讓她不至於發瘋.
NACHT: If you can't kill the eggs
and you don't find every last one of them, then you're starting all over again回到原點.
HENN: Today, Dale Clayton's company
sells the LouseBuster to nurses, schools and hospitals, and it leases it to
salons出借給美容沙龍
with names like Nitless Noggins and Hair Fairies.這些都是美髮沙龍的名字 [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION:
One of the salons leasing the LouseBuster was misidentified. It is Hair
Whisperers, not Hair Fairies.更正說明，其中一家髮廊的名字應是Hair Whisperers,而非廣播內容所報導的Hair Fairies ] Dale Clayton doubts this invention will ever
make him truly rich, but it has allowed him to scratch that entrepreneurial itch(止創業的癢)滿足一個渴望成為企業家的小夢.
Steve Henn, NPR News.
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