COMMON FLY IS AMONGST MAN’S WORST ENEMIES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 10, 20 October 1948, Page 6

COMMON FLY IS AMONGST MAN’S WORST ENEMIES

(By the Department of Health) The only good fly is a dead one. The only way to kill them is to go after them. The best places to go after them is where they bored. And the best time is particularly from October onwards. If success is to be judged by mere numbers, then the common house fly is the most successful insect in the world. Besides being one of mankind’s most common enemies, it produces diseases. With' the sole exception of the malarial mosquito, the common fly is of all creatures the most dangerous to man. All flies are destable insects because they have dirty habits, live on filth, and spoil the food we eat. The favourite breeding place is in decomposing rubbish of any sort. Garbage, manure, and compost heaps are particularly favourejd. Flies carry disease germs from their breeding and feeding places then, when they feel like a bit of dainty fare they fly into the horise for whatever food you have about. On this, they excrete or vomit their filthy germs; and dangerous germs, too, they are. Typhoid and dysentery are spread by flies. And they carry the germs of “summer diarrhoea,” which can be fatal to infants. Now is the time of year to determine that the war will be a deadly one against flies this summer. Fortunately we have a new weapon which has proved so effective that it’s reported from America that almost an entire state has been cleaned up and people leave their doors open without fly-screens for the first time in living memory. The state was sprayed bit by bit by big teams of men operating the new : insecticide, D.D.T. We can use the same means of killing flies inside our homes. The cure for ,them is to remove them. In any case keep food covered at all times. Remember that not only the flies but their breeding grounds must go, permanently, if we are to protect ourselves from this menace.