308 THE SPREAD OF INTESTINAL WORMS BY FLIES 



Med. Gaz. Mar. 1895) ionr cases of myiasis. An alcoholic woman 

 complained of pain in the eye and a feeling as though pebbles 

 were rolling over the eye-ball. The eye was red and much 

 swollen and the lids more or less glued together with pus and 

 blood. On separating them the space between the lower eyelid 

 and the globe was teeming with maggots, about twenty or thirty 

 in number, from their size apparently two or three days old. The 

 cornea was cloudy and ulcerated in two or three spots and vision 

 was materially impaired two months later. In Gisborne, a few 

 months previously, Salter removed a number of full-grown maggots 

 from the nose of a child aged seven months, the subject of 

 hereditary syphilis. On another occasion the presence of the 

 maggots accounted for a discharge from a child's navel. In a 

 woman with epithelioma of the left temporal region a large 

 number of full-grown maggots were removed which had almost 

 demolished the growth as well as the left lower eye-lid and had 

 found their way into the left orbit. In the same publication 

 Russell of Adelaide, as cited by Cleland, described a case in which 

 twenty-three maggots were removed from between the eye-lids, 

 and a case in which five maggots were extracted from a boy's ear, 

 from which there was a foetid discharge. In describing the case 

 of the maggots from the eye-lids he says : " There was a rounded 

 open ulcer the size of a si.xpenny piece at the inner corner of the 

 eye, which had not ulcerated through the whole thickness of the 

 lid. There was much conjunctivitis but no ulceration." 



These cases may readily be explained in the light of our 

 knowledge of the feeding and breeding habits of M. domestica 

 and its allies responsible for myiasis in man and other animals. 



The Role played by Flies in the Spread of 

 Intestinal Worms. 



It appears to have been an early surmise that house-flies 

 might, owing to their habits of seeking and frequenting excre- 

 ment, serve as a means of disseminating parasitic worms by either 

 infecting by contact *^he exterior of their bodies with the eggs of 

 the worms or by ingestion of the eggs in feeding. The human 

 excreta when moist are attractive to flies and the comparatively 



