No Peace With Flies

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 72, 8 November 1940, Page 4

No Peace With Flies

T is perhaps an exaggeration to say that London is in greater danger at present from bugs and parasites than from German bombs, but something very like that was said last week by Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, the British Minister of Health. The menace of disease increases as the menace of bombs is mastered, since it will not be possible for many months to drive the raiders from the sky, but is becoming increasingly possible every week to accommodate their quarry underground. London in short is becoming subterranean faster than it can be destroyed, and it is the speed with which the change is being effected that makes it so dangerous epidemically. There is, however, this saving factor in the situation-that the danger is in every man’s mind. If experts only were alarmed the situation would be almost hopeless. Yet an approximation to that danger threatens every town and city in peace. Bugs multiply and parasites swarm before the -experts can arouse us from our sleep. They will swarm throughout New Zealand during the next few months unless we are lucky enough to take alarm in advance. Summer will be here in five or six weeks, and summer means flies. It means the multiplication and distribution of everything that spawns in filth. It means reinforcements by the million million for the lurking enemies of childhood; the pollution of water; the poisoning of milk; the fouling of fruit and vegetables; the putrefaction of meat-all these things, and worse things, if we remain complacent and idle. This of course we will not do. We take some precautions each summer ‘because not to take them means discomfort. But we also take astounding risks, and the commonest and most senseless of all these is to aid and abet the crimes of the house-fly. How serious, and dangerous, these crimes are no one should require to have explained to him, but those who think our words alarmist should read a book issued this week from Pukekohe: Man and the House-fly, by D. McCready Armstrong. And if they think Mr. Armstrong alarmist they should ponder over the remark in the Foreword by Dr. W. R. B. Oliver, Director of the Dominion Museum, that the two dominant forms of life are Man and the Insects, one fighting the other in a war that can never cease,