Flies are not as frequent an annoyance as they used to be. Cleaning-up of surroundings, the use of flypaper and fly swatters and the various insect repellents are serving to eliminate them. Such flies as the common housefly, stable flies, greenbottle flies, bluebottle flies, blowflies, fruit flies, and others feed on contaminated garbage, and may spread viruses and germs.
Such filth-feeding flies have been incriminated in the spread of epidemics of typhoid, dysentery, diarrhea, cholera, infectious hepatitis, and other diseases.
A female housefly can lay as many as 2000 eggs during a lifetime—i.e., the fly’s lifetime. In warm weather these eggs hatch in from eight to ten hours and the new flies go right on breeding.