Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 152, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1915 — HOME TOWN HELPS [ARTICLE]

HOME TOWN HELPS

KEEPING THE CITY CLEAN Washington Physician Tells of the Importance of the Work That Has Been Done. “If Washington residents continue cleaning up this week as they did last week,” remarked a Washington physician, “a long step will be taken in the direction of making the national capital a flyless, dirtless and diseaseless city during the coming summer. “Dirt, flies and disease go hand in . hand. Get rid of the dirt, and the flies have nowhere to breed and propagate. Eliminate the flies, and three-fourths of the Bickness of summer will be prevented.

“There is no more reason for permitting accumulations of decaying rubbish, heaps of stable manure and the like to remain in alleys, on vacant lots, or hidden in back yards, than for allowing such refuse to exist in the front yard or the open public street,” the-doctor continued. "Property owners, householders and health officials alike would refuse to permit the continuance in exposed places of such debris and filth, the latter from sanitary reasons and the former out of pride. “But often the health authorities cannot know of such accumulations hidden in back yards with high board fences, and inspectors fail to discover them in out-of-the-way alleys, etc. In such cases the householder or the property owner ought to take a sufficient degree of pride in his home or his property to see that the rubbish is hauled away; if he doesn’t do it he ought to be prosecuted, the same as would be the case if he permitted any other nuisance to remain unabated. “Flies carry disease of many kinds, all of them filth diseases. Typhoid! fever is the chief among these, although a score of the co-called ‘summer ailments’ are borne by flies. Great progress has been made in Washington in the last few years in eliminating the fly by destroying the breeding places where the insects propagate and from which they spread to all the houses in the neighborhood. Much more can be done along this line if citizens generally will continue to cooperate in a whole-hearted manner in the clean-up activities, and it is not too much to say that continuance of campaigns such as that of this spring and several preceding springs may be expected, in a few years, to make flies as rare in the District of Columbia as buzzards are in Maine.”—Washington Star.