If you have identified a head louse infection, you should do some ‘contact tracing’ to try to identify others with an infection. Head lice are passed through close head to head contact and so there must be someone out there with a head louse infection who passed them to the infected person in the first place. There is also a chance that the infected person has passed head lice on to others before they were even aware of the infection.

It is best to draw up a list of all the people any infected people have been in contact with e.g. friends, family, classmates etc and make sure that all of these people are checked too, using the detection combing method.

Failure to carry out contact tracing can lead to further infections from close contacts after the infection has been cleared.

We have created a contact tracing list for you to download and print out. This should help you trace and identify people you think an infected person may have been in contact with. Click here to download it.

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