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contamination of food. The fact that, despite the insanitary conditions of
many rural homes, the infants therein so generally escape from this
disease, as compared with those in insanitary town dwellings, is
attributable to the greater proportion of the former infants who are
fed from the breast, and the immunity of breast-fed children explains
the advice (so generally offered to mothers in urban communities) not
to wean a breast-fed child in the hot summer months. But the
Sanitary Authority itself may be indirectly responsible for the complaint,
by its failure to provide efficient scavenging and watering in
the summer months.
There has been a considerable amount of rather loose pronouncement
upon the part played by flies in the dissemination of this disease;
but during the past year or two the facts collected have been very
convincing of the possibility of this mode of spread, and they demand
that the danger should be more generally recognised, and the
necessary precautions taken. It has been found that flies can take in
and pass out the eggs of intestinal worms affecting man, such as
tapeworms. The communicable diseases most under suspicion of
of being dispersed by flies are Typhoid Fever and Summer Diarrhœa,
and as flies alternately frequent refuse matter and food, they may
thus be the indirect means of conveying these infections to human
beings. Typhoid germs have been found on their wings, legs, and
bodies, and in their dejecta, and they have also been (experimentally)
carried by them from infected material to food. The reduction of
Typhoid Fever in water-closetted towns has been explained by the
lessened opportunities afforded by the development of and infection by
flies, as compared with the dry methods of excrement collection.
Again, many observers have noted that flies can take up the germ of
Consumption, and even of Plague, Cholera, and Contagious
Ophthalmia. Among the chief breeding-places of the house-fly are
collections of decaying and fermenting matter, such as are to be found
in middens containing horse manure, and ashpits or dustbins containing
fermenting vegetable matter. If these facts are realised, the
necessary precautions are fairly obvious:- In the first place, efforts
may be made to keep down the fly population by the prompt removal
and destruction of the decaying, fermenting matter in which they