The Dawson news. (Dawson, Ga.) 1889-current, 1909-09-15
COMMON HOUSE FLY AS A DISEASE CARRIER
ARE ATTRACTED WHERE THE STRONGEST
SMELLS ARE TO BE FOUND

1He IypnOlu ny, says n. L. Drew
ster in McClures for September, has
been found out at last. He is no
longer the pretty, harmless creature
to be rescued from the coffee,
shooed off the bread, or dug out of
the omelet. He is the bearer of dys-
EMERY and typhoid fever, of cholera
and tuberculosis, ophthalmia, and
even smallpox. In our last war he
killed more men in camp than the
Spaniards killed in battle.
Almost overnight we are beginning
to realize where the fly is born and
bred, and where his travels take
him, and what it is he washes off
into the milk. Certain facts are
coming to light that are calculated
to make the householder sit up and
instance, are exposed to dangers
through air and water, but not
through their food, and they die at
the worst a third faster during fly
time. Bottle" babies die three and
four times faster
But, after all, one does not need
statistics to make him suspicious of
the fly; for even such painstaking
studies as that of Daniel D. Jackson,
in New York city, who by means of
fly-traps placed in various places
showed a remarkably close coinci-
dence between the prevalence of flies
and the onset of fatal cases of ty-
phoid fever. The convincing evil
dence is that flies have been caught
with the goods.
1t is an old device, almost as old
as the science of bacteriology, to let
a fly crawl about on a sterilized
plate of nutritive gelatin such as is
commonly employed for growing cul- |
lures of bacteria. At first there is |
no sign; but, after few hours in |
the incubator, the insects track on |
the gelatin is outlined in flourishing
colonies of microbes. Virtually ev-
cry time the fly has put down any
one of his six feet he has planted
at least one germ. A march of one |
inch results in a hundred vigorous |
cultures
1t is pretty clean fly that does
not bear thousand germs. A fairly |
dirty one will carry fifty thousands. !
fly just back from swill-pail or pig |
pen, at the height of the season for |
flies and germs, carried a load APP
preaching the record number in a |
drop of city milk-and this is a we'll |
into the millions.
How Flies Seek Food.
Common opinion has it that the |
fly meditates profoundly on the con- |
duct of life, knows what he wants |
and why he wants it, and deliberate |
ly joins the assembly around the top |
of the kitchen screen door to wait |
for the chance to dodge in when the
cook comes out
AS matter of fact, the fly is no
such rational thinker. He has one
supreme motive in life, and that is
to move toward the strongest smell. |
He enters the house because there |
are more smells inside than out, and, |
once in, he freQuents the kitchen be- |
cause there are more smells there |
than in the parlor. The fly does not |
find it's food by sight, but by odor
only. In fact, the ly's sight is ex-
tremely poor; for nature has never |
solved the optical problem of making |
a small eye see as clearly as a large !
one. The customary swarm of flies |
around the kitchen door means only |
that the kitchen windows are opened |
at the bottom, and since the top of |
the door is the highest opening in |