THE DEADLY HOUSE FLY

King Country Chronicle, Volume IV, Issue 241, 12 March 1910, Page 5

THE DEADLY HOUSE FLY

Dr. J. S. Purdy, late District Health Officer, Auckland, has contributed a valuable paper to the Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute on "Flies and Fleas as Factors in Disease," and incidentally on the value of kerosene as an insecticide. He has made a special study of the structure, life habit, and breeding of t}ie house fly under varied conditions of locality and climate, His investigations have been pursued in military camps in South Africa, where they disseminated enteric fever; in the Sinai Peninsula, where they maintained the mortality standard among pilgrims smitten with bacillary dysentery; in Egypt, where, as is well known, they are carriers of the contagion. of the prevalent ophthalmia; but. he says, "perhaps one of the most striking cases of flyinfection within - my ken was that at the outbreak of the typhoid epidemic in Auckalnd last year" (1908). -As with house vermin, cleanliness the best safeguard against flies. * What has chiefly to be guarded against is their multiplication, which is encouraged by stables, latrines, and cesspools. Each fly may lay a thousand eggs in a season; a generation comes to maturity in ten days, and one summer may see as many as twelve generations. There is no reason to suppose that disease germs undergo any change or development in the fly, which seems to act only as a mechanical carrier, for which, however, he is most admirably fitted. The germs cling to the seven thousand hairs of his sticky feet, they infect his head and mouth, they are retained in full vigour in his digestive organs for days. He is by no means inconvenienced by a burden of a hundred thousand varied organisms, including those of infantile diarrhoea, enteric, and almost every infectious disease. His tastes leads him to alternate between the stores of household food and the unspeakably foul haunts of .putridity and disease—from the midden to the sugar basin and milk jug. "The filthy feet of faecal-feeding flies,'' the doctor tells us, in a burst of Swinburnian alliteration, are a leading factor in the spread of typhoid fever. His remedies are to prevent the accumulation of organic refuse, to have a water-carriage system of sewage wherever practicable, to keep earthejosets and rubbish receptacles well sprinkled with kerosene, to screen all kinds of food both in shops and houses, and encourage the fly-catching birds.