EVERY ONE CAN HELP 95 



not be required. Too often the word "sanitation" is 

 regarded as merely implying drains which do not smell. 

 And a dirty house or hotel or shop is often spoken of 

 as being in a good sanitary condition while the reverse 

 is the reality. The test of the sanitation of a house 

 lies in the weekly (or daily, if possible) examination of 

 its kitchen, its offices, its nooks, corners, and crannies, 

 its garbage cans, sinks, swill-tubs, its ash-bins, its 

 courtyards, its gullies, its rain-pipes, traps, and eaves, 

 its larders, and the cleanliness of its plates and dishes, 

 cloths, linen, and household management. Houses 

 thus clean will rarely harbour flies or fly-borne disease. 

 Organised fly-reduction on the lines laid down will give 

 the best results, but in some districts the killing of 

 individual flies may assist the organisation. We can 

 kill a few of the individual flies which infest a house by 

 trapping or using poisons or vapours, or by placing 

 screens over the doors and windows to keep flies out 

 such measures may be of use during fly-borne epidemics; 

 but, as stated before, we cannot thus seriously affect 

 the total population of insects in any locality or district. 

 The methods commonly in vogue are the use of fly- 

 papers, fly-traps, and the employment of formalin, etc. 

 But fly-papers and traps scattered about a house are 

 very unsightly objects, and the use of poisons is 

 dangerous to children and pet animals. The burning 

 of pyrethrum powder in a house is a troublesome and 

 often costly proceeding, and the fitting of fly-screens is 

 unheard-of in this country. All methods of killing 

 the flying insects are unsatisfactory. At Port Said, 

 every conceivable method was tried to reduce the 

 fly -imagines in a house, and although there was a slight 

 reduction of the insects, no lasting benefit accrued, 

 and it was found that the presence of numbers of dead 



