30 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 
those responsible for typhoid fever. The monthly bulletin of the 
New York State Department of Health for October 1908, states 
that during 1907 there were in New York State 37,370 deaths of 
infants under 2 years of age, 9213 being due to diarrhoea and 
enteritis. Careful investigators, it is stated, have placed the pro- 
portion of deaths between bottle-fed and breast-fed babies as 25 
to 1. Physicians recognize the necessity of providing pure milk 
tor young children, and in most instances it is comparatively easy 
to see how flies might be responsible for the major portion of the 
infections, since they usually occur in numbers about stables, in 
the vicinity of milk houses, in the neighborhood of milk stations, 
on milk wagons and, in fact, are found in greater or less numbers 
wherever milk is stored, excepting in refrigerators and similar 
piaces. Martin states that each succeeding year confirms his ob- 
servation of 1898 to the effect that the annual epidemic of diarrhoea 
and typhoid is connected with the appearance of the common house 
fly, while Nash, in the Lancet, records no mortality from diarrhoea 
among infants at Southend during July and August 1902, this 
immunity being accompanied by the almost complete absence of 
the house fly. This insect was abundant in that locality in Sep- 
tember and coincidently epidemic diarrhoea developed. Sandi- 
lands, in the Journal of Hygiene, states that the great majority of 
cases of diarrhoea are due to the consumption of infected food, 
and suggests that the seasonal incidence of diarrhoea coincides 
with and results from the seasonal prevalence of flies. Dr Jackson 
records several epidemics of a malignant type of dysentery radi- 
ating from a single point and disappearing entirely when proper 
disinfection of closets was enforced. 
The evil possibilities of the fly are by no means exhausted in the 
above recital. It is well known that flies feed upon sputum. Ex- 
periments by Lord recorded in the Boston Medical and Surgical 
Journal show that flies may ingest tubercular sputum and excrete 
tubercular bacilli, the virulence of which may last for at least 15 
days. He considers the danger of human infection from’ this 
source to lié in the ingestion of fly specks on food, and suggests 
that during the fly season great attention should be paid to the 
screening of rooms and hospital wards containing patients with 
tuberculosis and laboratories where tubercular material is ex- 
amined. 
Nuttall considers that the evidence previously submitted prove 
that the house fly may carry about and deposit anthrax bacilli, 
