Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 200, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 August 1910 — Odd News From Big Cities [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Odd News From Big Cities

Stories of Strange Happenings in the Metropolitan Towns

Uncle Sam Asks All to Swat the Fly

NEW YORK.—The whole United » States government, with Its vast treasury of wealth, ita, brainy statesmen and Insurgents, its army and navy, Its immense horde of highbrows, against the poor little house fly! Thafh the line-up in a bitter war of extermination scheduled to set the nation by the ears and enlist the courageous support of every man, woman and child in thig broad land. The final knell of the house fly has been sounded and the battle 'has Just b'egun. “Catch ’em and kill ’em; show no Quarter” —that is the war cry of the afmy of extermination that is to put forth every effort to rid the land of the Musca Domestica, the polite name by which the-house fly should be addressed by strangers. Until the scientists got busy with their investigations the house fly was considered merely as a pestiferous insect, designed by the Creator of all things merely to take its bath in the Bweet and maple sirup, annoy the late morning sleeper, skate about with abandon on the polished surface of shiny baldheads and practise the Morse telegraph code on the cleanest of windows. Long suffering housewives since time began were the only really active enemies of the seemingly insignificant little fly, and they alone and unaided applied the imprecations and dish cloths vigorously against the nuisance. But after the scientists got onto the

job the fight against the insect began to assume proportions of magnitude. That little insect which the average citizen was wont to regard merely as a domestic pest 1b now branded as the most dangerous creature on.earth. The house fly has been publicly indicted as a murderer of the human race, the greatest disease propagator and the carrier of more menacing and malignant gs rms than all other creatures put together. „ " V J This little, but potent, messenger of death wanders from the sick room, from the filth of the garbage pail, from the heaps of refuse of all kinds into the peaceful, happq homes of our land, walks upon the butter, the me%t, the fruit, the sugar, takes a bath in the milk, leaving everywhere th 6 germs of disease that have gathered upon its furry feet and body. About half the deaths from typhoid in New York, according to the health authorities, are attributed directly to the distribution of germs by house flies. And worse than that, the figures show that of 7,000 deaths of cooing babies in that city from infantile diseases, more Qian 6,000 were traced to infection carried by house flies. According to a noted scientist the extermination of the pest is comparatively easy. All that is necessary, he says, is a systematic effort on the part of the public. If all the people will practise the'utmost cleanliness, it is declared, the house-fly will be extinct in this country within a few years, for the house fly cannot exist without filth. “Cleanliness," then, is the watchword for the American public to put an end to an insect that is not only a terrible nuisance, but a terrible instrument of death to thousands of our population every year.