Fig. 77 —Photograph of wigglers, the stage in which the mosquito lives a week or two in water.
Getting rid of Mosquitoes.—During warm weather mosquitoes cause the death of more than a thousand persons in the world every day besides making many others very sick. To get rid of mosquitoes is to prevent sickness and death. In one year yellow fever killed over five thousand people in New York and Philadelphia because the doctors did not know how to stop the disease from spreading.
When this fever broke out in New Orleans in 1905, less than five hundred persons died of it because the doctors had then learned that the disease is spread only by the yellow fever mosquito. They therefore began killing the mosquitoes. Kerosene was poured over all the ponds and stagnant pools of water which could not be drained. This kills the young mosquitoes because the oil gets into their breathing tube which they stick up to the surface of the water to get air. All rain barrels and tin cans were emptied and cisterns were tightly covered. Men, women, and children worked week days and Sundays killing mosquitoes because they knew that they were saving human life. The destroying fever was stopped.
Fig. 78 —Photograph of eggs laid on waste matter by two flies in one hour.
Flies cause much Sickness.—Very few people are afraid of house flies because they do not bite. Although they are so small and seemingly harmless yet we know that they cause many more deaths every year than mad dogs, poisonous snakes, and all wild beasts.
Flies crawl around among slops, in spittoons, and in other unclean places. In this way they get thousands of germs of tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and cholera on their feet and then scatter them over our food as they crawl about on the table, in the grocery store, or among the milk cans. In our last war with Spain more than a thousand of our soldiers were made sick with fever carried to them by flies.