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Show FLIES AND TYPHOID. Professor John Z. Brown, assistant teacher of physiology and hygiene at the University of Utah, and Dr. T. B. Beatty of the Utah board of health contend that typhoid fever is produced by inoculation inocula-tion from our pestiferous enemy, the ubiquitous fly. And who among us may say the doctors are j wrong? As yellow'fever is carried from house to house by the female mosquito known as the stego-mia stego-mia calopus, so, Dr. Brown assures us, is typhoid carried by the little stable fly which, alone of all the species bites its victim, the others performing their contracts by suction. When in 1893 Dr. Max Zimmerman of the Berlin university propounded the theory that the domestic fly carried the germs of typhoid and deposited them on our ordinary food and drink, the scientific world gave a rather chilling reception to his contention. Experiments with the fly and the disease partially confirmed the doctor's theory, and he was hailed as a benefactor of the human race and the discoverer of the cause of typhoid. We have in our possession a pamphlet entitled "Beschryving van Guiana Wanderings in Guiana" published in Dutch, at Antwerp, in 1770, by Von J. J. Hartsinck, in which he assures us that, among the Guaranos, the Caribs and the tribes living by the rivers and marshes of inland Guiana, the fact that flies and mosquitoes carried the germs of disease dis-ease from one person to another was well known. Here is what Von Hartsinck writes: "These nations are subject to few diseases; which is principally attributed to their plain food and plenty of exercise; there are hardly any to be found ill-shaped or infirm; they are strong by nature; na-ture; many attain a great age; they are, however, subject to a swelling of the throat, which is attributed at-tributed to eating raw meat." "The Yaws, a bad sort of a disease, which manifests man-ifests itself 'in large ulcers, in size like a guilder, i3 common with them, and so contagious that if a fly or a mosquito has pitched upon a person having the disease and afterwards on a sore of another person, that person gets the disease, the infection is carried by the fly, which even Europeans living in this country have experienced." So that Dr. Zimmerman and the American physicians, phy-sicians, who discovered in Cuba, inoculation of yellow yel-low fever by the mosquito, were perhaps five hundred hun-dred years behind the savages of Demerara and Guiana in their loudly applauded discoveries. When the Mongoose was brought from Martin ique to South Carolina to exterminate the snakes, which at the worst were only a nuisance, they completed com-pleted their contract satisfactorily. But when the snakes were exterminated, it was. discovered that the grub and other5 larvae and field insects indigenous indige-nous to South Carolina, and on which the snakes fed, increased enormously and in many places destroyed de-stroyed the young crops. In the year 1623, Motolona tells us in his history, his-tory, the people of Barcelona, Spain, exterminated the rats in their walled city and two years afterward after-ward a mysterious plague broke out (probably from decaying garbage in cellars) which swept off nine thousand of the citizens. The legend of the Pied Piper, who charmed the rata out of the city of Hamlin, and the ruin which fell upon the unhappy people is an allegorical story of the effects which follow' the destruction of the garbage and refuse eaters. Before waging a war of extermination on the fly, might it not be well first to investigate and try to discover what useful purpose in nature the fly serves, lest by destroying him we bring upon ourselves our-selves a more dangerous enemy than the domestic fly? Outside the polar circles the fly is everywhere; he; may be man's benefactor in disguise, and, depend de-pend upon it, he would not be with us unless he was accomplishing some beneficial purpose. |
