Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 81.djvu/48

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 Four ounces of material from the top of this carload contained between 700 and 800 maggots, by actual count.

warm weather only ten clays are required to develop a generation. Each female may lay 120 eggs, and her possible progeny amounts to more than 3,000,000,000 in a single season. Hence the tremendous increase in the number of flies the latter part of the summer. Then please visit some of our cheap restaurants and meat markets, and note how they are swarming with flies which crawl all over the unprotected food and provisions. If you must eat food from such a place, choose something that can be cooked thoroughly before eating, or if raw, something that has a natural covering to be removed before eating, like an orange or banana. Remember that typhoid fever does not always come through the water or milk supply or by eating oysters.

Of course flies do not originate typhoid fever, but if a case occurs in a locality where conditions are unsanitary they are sure to spread it.

The stable manure which is shipped in carloads from the cities to suburban or country districts is an excellent breeding place for flies. Two years ago one of my assistants examined such a loaded car standing upon the siding near this city (New Haven). The contents had come from New York and was waiting to be unloaded for use upon the land for growing fruit or vegetable crops. The upper two inches of the manure was literally swarming with maggots. Some of the material was taken to the laboratory, and four ounces of it contained between 700 and 800 maggots, by actual count!

What of ordinances and health board regulations? It is true that anti-spitting rules are in force, as are also regulations about the covering of foodstuffs when carted through the streets or exhibited for sale, and garbage cans and wagons must be covered. Is it unreasonable to