THE HOUSE FLY DISEASE CARRIER 



ing degree the attention which is now being paid to 

 the house fly and its near relative Musca entccniata. 

 More or less definite proof of the connection between 

 flies and enteric fever is given again and again and 

 great attention has been paid to the question of latrines. 

 For example, Lieut. Col. F. W. C. Jones (1907) uses 

 the following phraseology : " Believing as we do that 

 flies are the chief carriers of enteric fever in India, any 

 plan which gets rid of them is worthy of considera- 

 tion." And then the author proceeds to discuss the 

 relative merits of incineration of excreta and other 

 plans. Of course the officers of the army have con- 

 trol over their camps, but in India great difficulty has 

 been experienced in enforcing the proper views upon 

 high-caste natives. 



Colonel Jones, in the article just cited, found a cer- 

 tain line of reasoning very useful, not only with high- 

 caste native officers but with men on maneuvers. This 

 consisted in an explanation of the meaning of the word 

 kakophagy, which, being translated from the Greek, 

 means excrement-eating. Colonel Jones writes. "I pre- 

 sume no one wishes to be a kakophagist ; yet we are so 

 in spite of ourselves, if flies bred in filth pits alight on 

 our food just before we eat it." The high-caste officers 

 at first looked upon sanitary measures as being only 

 meant to worry them, but Colonel Jones got several of 

 them together and to the best of his ability explained 

 that men who took no precautions in camps to prevent 

 the breeding of flies must of necessity be kakophagists. 

 He found that this appealed to them most strongly, and 



