Further preliminary reports on flies as carriers of infection.

Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Further preliminary reports on flies as carriers of infection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    disease in that house and others in the house next to it ? ” He had recently observed the behaviour of flies in a military camp and “ seen fsecal matter in shallow trenches open to the air, with the merest apology for disinfection, and only lightly covered with earth at intervals of a day or two. In sultry weather this material, fresh from the bowel and in its most dangerous condition, was covered by myriads of flies, and at a short distance there was a tent, equally open to the air, for dining and cooking (!). To say that the flies were busy travelling back and forth between these two places is putting it mildly.” (He states he made cultures from the fly-tracks and excrements but does not say what organisms he found.) He concludes that the conveyance of typhoid infection “ in the manner indicated is the chief factor in decimating the army.” He very rightly adds : “ Certainly, as far as it is known to the writer, nothing adequate has been said about it in current discussions.” On the other hand, the water supply has constantly been blamed. Chmelicek (1899, p. 193), writing of his observations on typhoid epidemics in southern camps at the time of the Spanish- American war, states of the camp at Tampa, Florida : “ The pits were only about forty feet from the entrance to the kitchen tent, and the number of flies around these holes was countless.” The largest number of cases of typhoid occurred amongst cavalrymen, a fact which the author (p. 196) attributes to “ the numberless flies that gather around horses,” the flies flying about from the pits to the kitchen where the brown sugar “ exposed for hours was almost black with them, looking more like a bag or box full of rasins than sugar.” “It was impossible to keep the flies from the already cooked food, even if a man kept one hand over it and ate it with the other.” The directions of Surgeon-General Sternberg, U.S.A. (25, IV. 1898, Circular No. 1) were explicit enough to guard against the camp conditions described above and they deflnitely state that flies are probably carriers of typhoid since “ they swarm about faacal matter and filth of all kinds deposited upon the ground or in shallow pits and directly convey infectious material attached to their feet or contained in their excreta to the food which is exposed .... Walter Reed, Surgeon in the U.S. Army, reported that the typhoid epidemic in camps in Cuba was certainly due to food contaminated by flies “the conditions being especially favourable for this manner of dissemination.” Victor Vaughan, member of the U.S. Army Typhtiid Com- mission, in 1900, came to the following conclusion, believing that flies were active in the dissemination of typhoid fever : — “ (a) Flies swarmed over infected faecal matter in the pits, and then visited and fed upon the food prepared for the soldiers at the mess tents. Where lime had been recently sprinkled over the contents of the pits, flies with their feet whitened with lime, were seen walking over the food. (b) Officers, whose mess tents were protected by means of screens, suffered proportionately less from typhoid fever than did those whose tents were not so protected.