DISSEMINATORS OF DISEASE 61 



'/. carried from place to place, from creature to creature, 

 / and from person to person, through the intervention or 

 \ agency of the house-fly. The medical profession are 

 / convinced that infantile mortality from epidemic 

 \^ diarrhoea must be attributable to summer flies. 



In the matter of food which becomes fly-infected after 

 having been cooked, or of food like milk, butter, and 

 fruit, which are consumed raw, it should be known 

 that a single pathogenic germ of ultra-microscopic 

 dimensions, having obtained lodgment in the body, 

 may there multiply and originate a fatal disease. On \ 

 the other hand, raw meat which has been infected may, J 

 after the bacteria have been all killed by cooking,_3 

 contain excreted poison in deleterious quantity. / The 

 decomposition of infected meat begins ten or twelve 

 hours before the bad odour is perceptible. 



Fortunately the omnipresent germs which most 

 commonly deteriorate our food are not very actively 

 deleterious, or are only slightly debilitating; yet 

 wherever such less obnoxious germs get lodgment, 

 there the ready prepared and most favourable breeding 

 place for the worser kind is to be found. The various 

 species of these evil things are not always exterminating 

 competitors ; they sometimes flourish in company, and 

 dwell together, like the seven devils within the exorcised 

 and sane man after his relapse, as mentioned in the 

 Scripture. 



That food gets fly-blown and maggot-infected is a 

 very disgusting fact, but the plainly visible result is 

 of little hygienic significance apart from the more 

 concealed facts of the fly-borne conveyance of zymotic 

 diseases. 



