Fly's Freight

One million germs are carried among the body hairs and on the feet of one ordinary housefly. Flies captured in garbage cans and other "obviously insanitary" places may be laden with as many as 6,000,000 germs each. Such was the report last week of the American Institute of Sanitation, two of whose staff research-ers minutely examined the bacterial cargoes of 400 flies.

Invaluable to any fly are the pads, two on each of its six feet, which secrete a sticky fluid and enable the fly to traverse vertical surfaces and ceilings. But as a magnet picks up nails, those pads pick up germs which are shed at every step. The appalling trail of potential infection which a restless fly leaves may be shown, the Institute stated, by causing the insect to walk across glass surfaced with sterile gelatin. Soon the footprints are visible under the microscope--outlined by teeming colonies of bacteria.

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