10 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



Typhoid fever, while a most dangerous infection, is not the 

 only disease which may be conveyed by flies. Certain forms 

 of diarrhoea and enteritis are undoubtedly due to specific germs^ 

 and there is no reason why the bacilli causing these infections 

 may not be carried as easily and in the same way as those 

 responsible for typhoid fever. The monthly bulletin of the 

 New York State Department of Health for October 1908, states 

 that during 1907 there were in New York State 37,370 deaths of 

 infants under 2 years of age^ 9213 being due to diarrhoea and 

 enteritis. Careful investigators, it is stated, have placed the propor- 

 tion of deaths between bottle-fed and breast-fed babies as 25 to 1. 

 Physicians recognize the necessity of providing pure milk for 

 young children, and in most instances it is comparatively easy to 

 see how flies might be responsible for the major portion of the 

 infections, since they usually occur in numbers about stables, in 

 the vicinity of milk houses, in the neighborhood of milk stations^ 

 on milk wagons and, in fact, are found in greater or less numbers 

 wherever milk is stored, excepting in refrigerators and similar 

 places. Martin states that each succeeding year confirms his ob- 

 servation of 1898 to the effect that the annual epidemic of diarrhoea 

 and typhoid is connected with the appearance of the common house 

 fly, while Nash, in the Lancet, records no mortality from diarrhoea 

 among infants at Southend during July and August 1902, this 

 immunity being accompanied by the almost complete absence of the 

 house fly. This insect was abundant in that locality in Septem- 

 ber and coincidently epidemic diarrhoea developed. Sandilands. 

 in the Journal of Hygiene, states that the great majority of cases 

 of diarrhoea are due to the consumption of infected food, and 

 suggests that the seasonal incidence of diarrhoea coincides with and 

 results from the seasonal prevalence of flies. Dr Jackson of New 

 York records several epidemics of a malignant type of dysentery 

 radiating from a single point and disappearing entirely when proper 

 disinfection of closets was enforced. 



The evil possibilities of the fly are by no means exhausted in the 

 above recital. It is well known that flies feed upon sputum. Ex- 

 periments by Lord recorded in the Boston Medical and Surgical 

 Journal show that flies may ingest tubercular sputum and excrete 

 tubercular bacilli, the virulence of which may last for at least 15 

 days. He considers the danger of human infection from this 

 source to lie in the ingestion of fly specks on food, and suggests 



