Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 September 1889 — Flies Scatter Contagion. [ARTICLE]

Flies Scatter Contagion.

Since the recognition that in many diseases the infective principle is particulate, the possible means of conveyance of the virus, from one to another individual have widened. Attention has lately been recalled to the part which may conceivably bo played in this direction by the agency of the house-fly. Our contemporary, the Liverpool Mercury, reminds us that the granular ophthalmia of the shores of the Nile—a true pleaguo of Egypt—has been shown to be propagated -through this medium; and has farther alluded to the discovery of Dr. Alessi that the bacillus tuberculosis may exist in the intestines of flies which have been feeding oh phthisical sputa. Indeed. it would appear that there is hardly any direction, either in our mode of living, eating or enviroment, whereby we can avert the possibility of the transference to ourselves of this übiquitous bscillus, and life would become intolerable were it not for the well-grounded belief that phthisis is not dependent for its development upon this microbe solely, but upon the concurrence of many conditions of almost, if not quite as much importance as its implantation in the body. Apropos of flies, however, it has been stated that the lamented Father Damien attributed bis leprosy to the inoculation, through their agency, of an abrasibn in the scalp.