(Photo by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

A male louse under magnification.

Whenever children head back to school, a pest crawls back into the spotlight. Head lice are well known, but trying to figure out how to get rid of them has many parents scratching their heads.

That’s because the lice of today are resistant to many of the over-the-counter lice shampoos parents have relied on for years. In the most recent data from the Journal of Entomology, 100 percent of lice tested in Arizona and other states were these so-called “super lice.”

Dawn Gouge, an entomology professor at the University of Arizona, said popular lice shampoos like Rid and Nix haven’t been very effective for more than a decade.

“And the longer the useless products are on the shelf, and the more they’re relied upon, the more the resistance issue will emerge,” she said. “And it just gets compounded over time.”

There are super shampoos to combat these super lice, however, with an active ingredient called benzyl alcohol.

“But you have to be willing to go to your pediatrician and ask specifically, by name, ‘I want this,” Gouge said, who has used a benzyl alcohol product on her own child.