My daughter has been diagnosed with head lice & I need to treat her backpack (I’ve already done the rest of the work to the house, toys, coats, bed, her head etc). The school nurse said to throw it in the dryer on high heat for at least 20 min. I just don’t want to ruin the backpack. Should it be okay?
Can I Put A 100% Polyester Backpack In The Dryer On High Heat?
October 5th, 2009 
Luggage Boy 
Posted in Q & A 
Tags: 100%, Amp, Backpack, Can, Coats, Head Lice, High Heat, I, Polyester, Put, School Nurse, Toys
It could melt into an icky ball of goo, even if there with a wet towel. What will also work is sticking it in a plastic bag (garbage bag) and putting it in the freezer overnight. Cold kills lice and nits just as well as heat.
Then wash the bag and allow it to hang dry. This will wash their dead carcasses away.
The freezer treatment also works on stuffed animals, pillows, and other hard to wash items.
This cleaning for head lice is not necessary.
Please read the followingcarefully.
Myth #5 Why Do We Clean Our Houses???
I’m really nailing these myths wide open and I want to keep on rolling so guess what?
Cleaning your house is NOT necessary. It adds nothing to your head lice treatment regime. In fact, you’re just wasting your effort, your time and your money.
If your children have head lice and you’re running around like you’ve gone mad, trying to launder the sheets, vacuum the floors and clean your house, STOP now!
They’re called head lice for a reason and it’s because they live on human heads. They don’t live on floors, or on sheets or carpeting. If a louse did fall off a head, which is unlikely because its claws really can latch on, the louse would die quickly.
If death didn’t occur, to get back on your child’s head, he or she would have to do a headstand, on the furniture where the louse landed, and remain that way until the now weakened louse climbed back onto a strand of hair.
This could happen, just like you could win the Lottery and like lightening could strike you, but the chances aren’t that great.
In fact, a study by the Head Lice Research Group at James Cook University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine located in Australia concluded that the chances were one in a thousand that a louse would end up in a pillow after an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, you could sleep for almost 3 full years in the same bed before a live louse ended up on your pillow. You’d have to agree that those odds are small.
And then, after about 12 hours and IF the louse somehow survived, it would have to muster up the strength to climb back on the head again. The chances of this type of reinfestation happening are there, but they’re slight which is why you shouldn’t knock yourself out trying to rid your home of lice.
Instead, re-channel your efforts.
The scientists from the above-mentioned study also conducted another study. This time it involved sweeping 100 classroom floors that had been occupied by children known to have current lice infestations.
After testing the floor debris, they found not one louse!
While one team looked more closely at the floors the other team examined the children’s heads. That team found and removed over 7,000 lice from these heads. They identified 7,000+ lice on the heads yet they did not find even one on the floor.
So stop trying to rid your floors of lice that aren’t even there and instead put all that effort into dealing with your child’s head. That’s the winning solution!
The same goes for spraying those aerosols around your home. All you’re doing is spreading poison. You’re not killing any lice because there aren’t any lice in your home. That’s just crazy.
This is the advice we have been giving parents for over 7 years and all during that time, no parent has said they wished they had cleaned more. Instead what we’ve been hearing is how fortunate parents feel knowing they’re no longer wasting time on the home because that’s given them more energy to focus where the problem is on their children’s heads. In fact, after refocusing, many were able to successfully eliminate the lice problem sooner.
As we’ve watched new web sites dealing with head lice emerge, we’ve noticed that they all seem to copy the same information from other web sites and then, in an effort to sound thorough and more authoritative, they add snippets of advice here and there.
Unfortunately, none of them challenge anything they read or do anything to stop the spread of such poor advice. It seems their only goal is to provide more content to parents, regardless of whether it’s good or bad.
Want to know what we think? We think you should believe half the things you read.
Don’t blow this problem out of proportion. All you have to do is remove the tiny critters from the top of a child’s head. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Hopefully we’ve managed to free up more time for parents. We also hope we’ve gotten parents to refocus their efforts from the furniture to their children’s heads, where it belongs.
If you’re ready to start treating head lice successfully, click over to http://www.nitmix.com where you can read all about our solution.
Spray it with vinegar !!!
Polyester will melt in a dryer on high heat. I’d just toss it and buy her a new one.
I’m not sure but you can kill the lice by sealing the bag toys, pillows what ever in a garbage bag. Just close the bag and let the air out . Leave sealed for a few days.
Treat it by throwing it away and buying her a new one. No problems no worries, and no on high heat.
Probably for about twenty minutes, just to get it halfway dry, then take it out, shake it and put it on a clothes hanger (by the straps) and hang it to dry overnight, as to keep it’s shape. Good luck.
If you put a wet towel in with the backpack for the minimum time, you won’t have to worry about the dryer melting because you have something else to attract the heat to it.