1,222,570 Different Bacteria on One House Fly

1910

U.S. Government Asks All to Swat the Fly

NEW YORK. — The whole United States government, with its vast treasury of wealth, its brainy statesmen and insurgents, its army and navy, its immense horde of highbrows, against the poor little house fly! That's the line-up in a bitter war of extermination scheduled to set the nation by the cars and enlist the courageous support of every man, woman and child in this broad land. The final knell of the house fly has been sounded and the battle has just begun. "Catch 'em and kill 'em; show no quarter" — that is the war cry of the army of extermination that is to put forth every effort to rid the land of the Musca Domestica, the polite name by which the house fly should be addressed by strangers.

Until the scientists got busy with their investigations the house fly was considered merely as a pestiferous insect, designed by the Creator of all things merely to take its bath in the sweet cream and maple syrup, annoy the late morning sleeper, skate about with abandon on the polished surface of shiny baldheads and practice the Morse telegraph code on the cleanest of windows.

Long suffering housewives since time began were the only really active enemies of the seemingly insignificant little fly, and they alone and unaided applied the imprecations and dish cloths vigorously against the nuisance. But after the scientists got onto the job the fight against the insect began to assume proportions of magnitude.

That little insect which the average citizen was wont to regard merely as a domestic pest is now branded as the most dangerous creature on earth. The house fly has been publicly indicted as a murderer of the human race, the greatest disease propagator and the carrier of more menacing and malignant germs than all other creatures put together.

This little, but potent, messenger of death wanders from the sick room, from the filth of the garbage pail, from the heaps of refuse of all kinds into the peaceful, happy homes of our land, walks upon the butter, the meat, the fruit, the sugar, takes a bath in the milk, leaving everywhere the germs of disease that have gathered upon its furry feet and body.

In experiments conducted by the New York health authorities the scientists found on the body of a single little fly 1,222,570 different bacteria, enough to kill a few thousand human beings. In another experiment a fly was caught in a sterilized net and dropped into a bottle of sterilized water. The bottle was shaken and the germs washed off the insect's body, as would be the case if the fly dropped into a glass of milk for the baby. The previously pure water was then examined and it was discovered that the fly's bath contained no less than 5,000,000 disease germs.

About half the deaths from typhoid in New York, according to the health authorities, are attributed directly to the distribution of germs by house flies. And worse than that, the figures show that of 7,000 deaths of cooing babies in that city from infantile diseases, more than 5,000 were traced to infection carried by house flies.

According to a noted scientist the extermination of the pest is comparatively easy. All that is necessary, he says, is a systematic effort on the part of the public. If all the people will practice the utmost cleanliness, it is declared, the house fly will be extinct in this country within a few years, for the house fly cannot exist without filth.

"Cleanliness," then, is the watchword for the American public to put an end to an insect that is not only a terrible nuisance, but a terrible instrument of death to thousands of our population every year.