FIGHTING FLIES
The house fly is no longer a mere nuisance, but is a menace to health. He is well named the typhoid fly and the filth fly. The boys and girls who help rid their neighbourhood of these disease-carrying pests are real patriots.
Flies are not a heaven-sent plague in this day and generation. Flies in the milk, flies in the pantry, flies on the kitchen door, flies buzzing about the table, are the obvious result of carelessness and mismanagement. What is more, the remedies are not hard to apply. The typhoid fly (house fly) breeds in horse manure. The adult fly feeds upon every known variety of filth as well as upon good food, but the undeveloped fly is a footless maggot and it breeds in your own and your neighbour's stable yard.
People will go on buying fly paper, fly poison, fly traps, screen doors, and window netting to keep flies out, but the very fly that has visited a typhoid patient to-day may to-morrow leave the imprint of his foul feet on the baby's face, or drown himself, but not his germs, in your gravy.
What does your father have a manure pile for? If he is a frugal farmer he expects to put it on his fields when the other work is out of the way, and plough it in. He knows the value of manure on fields. But does he realize that the best time to carry the manure out is while it is new? Every expert will tell him so and why. In the pile by the barn it lies and burns. Have you seen it smoke? Burnt manure is wasted fertilizer. When it rains, the valuable elements needed by the soil leach out and nourish the crop of "jimson weeds" and burdocks that will crowd round the barn yard next year.
Meantime the flies buzz round the manure pile. The worse it smells the better they like it. They are there for business. Eggs, thousands upon thousands of tiny flies' eggs, are deposited by industrious and prolific flies. A fly's egg! The hired man will laugh at you for bothering over a thing so insignificant. But when his wife comes down with typhoid and the flies come in and worry her, he will complain of his luck and drive out the flies, which go merrily forth to start little private epidemics all over the neighbourhood.
Destroy their breeding places. That is one remedy for flies. Trap them, poison them, discourage them.
Is it worth while for you to do this when the rest of the people do not? Yes, indeed. If you have very near neighbours, their flies may get to you to some extent, but with nothing to furnish breeding places, and no foul-smelling swill or decaying animal or vegetable stuff around, they will not be attracted to your place. Awaken the neighbour's interest in your "fly-destroying crusade." If you can reach results best by forming a club, organize and pass resolutions and wake people up to their responsibilities. This is practical work for a boys' good citizenship club.