142 THE HOUSE FLY—DISEASE CARRIER 
they happen to be.* The writer.has shown that the 
typhoid fly oviposits upon such individual dejecta and 
that its larvse successfully breed in them, and that the 
adult flies of the next generation issue from them un¬ 
der the ordinary summer moisture conditions that pre¬ 
vail in Washington, f With the now well-known per¬ 
centage of chronic typhoid carriers (from three to four 
per cent.) and with the hundreds of cases of typhoid 
that have occurred annually in the city of Washington 
during the past ten years, and with the existence as ac¬ 
tually observed of such loose and ill-placed dejecta, 
and with flies feeding upon them and breeding in them 
within short distances from unprotected kitchens and 
pantries, to say nothing of markets and food shops, 
how is it possible that flies should be factors of no great 
moment? Surely there must be scores of typhoid car¬ 
riers living in Washington to-day. 
Moreover, there still exists in portions of even the 
cleanly city of Washington the uncared-for box-privy 
nuisance. The judgment in this case is not hasty. It 
*This occurs in every city. Newstead in his Liverpool (Eng¬ 
land) report writes: "In the course of my investigations, more 
especially on hot days, numbers of house flies were seen hovering 
over or feeding on such matter [human droppings]. The feces 
were generally those of children, and were lying, as a rule, a few 
feet from the doorways, in the courts or in the passages behind 
the houses. In one instance no less than five patches of human 
excreta were lying in one court, and all of them were attended 
by house flies.” 
tThe exact records of these experiments and rearings will be 
found in the writer’s 1900 paper. The especial cases in point are 
mentioned on p. 572, as many as thirty-one house flies being 
reared from a single dropping of a child. We have elsewhere 
mentioned Major Faichnie’s record of the rearing of 500 flies 
from a single dropping. 
