334 The Philippine Journal of Science 1915 
ments, is the commonest of the small flies which breed therein. 
Its period of development is from nine to ten days, and eggs are 
laid when the fly is 5 days old. The promptness with which 
fecal or putrefying material attracts these flies when kept in- 
doors suggests that they are not scarce. 
Their minute size enables them to pass through the ordinary 
fly-proof screens used as prophylactic means against the invasion 
by the common house fly and other large species of Diptera. 
In these series of experiments sufficient evidence is furnished 
to indicate this species of Diptera as a possible porter or carrier 
of Asiatic cholera. 
These flies may serve as agents in the dissemination of Asiatic 
cholera and, by analogy, other alimentary infections, such as 
typhoid fever, bacillary dysentery, and infantile diarrhcea; by 
ingested food which has been contaminated by organisms from 
the fly’s body surface and feces; or by ingestion of the entire 
fly which may have become incarcerated within the food. 
Fly-proof wire-screen bell jars employed in restaurants, 
kitchens, and tiendas to protect food against the common house 
fiy do not exclude the Phoride. 
Fly-proof sanitary pails which are ordinarily used for the 
deposit of human excrement, although proof against the common 
house fly, may not be secure against invasion by the Phoride. 
The fact that cholera vibrios may be transmitted from larve, 
through pupz, into emerging imagines is of importance from a 
public hygienic standpoint only under exceptional circumstances. 
This is possible only if feeces heavily infected with cholera vib- 
rios should be deposited among larve which are due to emerge 
as adults in a day or two. 
Chantemesse, (21) in studying the spread of cholera in Europe, 
lays special emphasis upon the common house fly as a carrier of 
cholera vibrios by contaminating food with vibrios contained 
on their feet and in their feeces. He demonstrated that flies 
harbor vibrios in the tubes of their feet and in their feces for 
seventeen hours. 
Cholera vibrios have been isolated by Ganon(44) from flies 
twenty-four hours after they had been fed on infective material. 
Graham-Smith recovered them in the feces and on the legs 
after thirty hours, and in the crop and gut after two days. 
In the Philippine Islands, where there are many questions un- 
solved in the epidemiology of Asiatic cholera, the insects of the 
dipterous family Phoride are worthy of serious consideration. 
