WHY A FLY MOST DIE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3294, 12 August 1911, Page 4

WHY A FLY MOST DIE.

MAN’S MOST TERRIBLE ENEMY

“The house-fly exists only through the toleration of men—a toleration which, were it not ignorant, would be criminal,’ 'says the “World’s Work.” “The house-fly is the most ternofe single enemy that mankind has among living creatures Beasts of the jungle have slain their thousands, but this prowler in the houshold has slain his tens of thousands. Of all vermin lie is the most filthy; of all purveyors of disease the most deadly. “The house-fly is born in offal —nowhere else. The manure pile and the cesspool are his home. It is from these haunts that he comes to visit the kitchen, the dining-room, and the nursery. He drags his filthy feet across the bread, dips them in the butter, wipes them on the meat, and bathes in the milk. He seeks out the sickroom and sips tire delicious excretions of the consumptive, the typhoid fever patient, and the child with summer complaint.” This is not only the opinion of the “World’s Work,” for our own Local Government Board has issued reports made on the results of experimental investigations designed to prove the extent to which infection may be carried by flies. Experiments were made to measure the possible range of flight of flies, and further observations were recorded on, the ways in which artificially infected flies carry and distribute pathogenic and other bacteria. The experiments and observations quoted in the report show definitely that artificially infected flies, both house-flies and blow-flies, are capable of infecting fluids such as milk and syrup, on which they feed and into which they fall. In the case of the house-fly, infected with certain micro-organisms, gross infection may be produced in milk for at least three days, and a smaller degree of infection for ten days or even longer. Blow-flies produce gross infection for six to nine days with nohspore-bearing micro-organisms and some degree of infection for three or four weeks.