According to scientists, flies are more of a threat to people’s health than mosquitoes, even though they don’t bite.
This is because they eat feces and garbage and drink sewage water before landing on your plate and puking their insides on it.
As a result, the experts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are making it very clear that we need to pay more attention to the risks linked to the common house fly.
The scientists pointed out that while research has been focusing mainly on mosquitoes when it comes to spreading disease, flies could be an even greater danger.
The author of the study published in the journal Insects, John Stoffolano, explains that “I have been working on synanthropic flies since I was just a graduate student in the 1960s. And synanthropic flies have mostly been ignored. Blood feeding flies have taken the limelight, but we must pay attention to the ones that live among us as they get their nutrients from people and animals that shed pathogens in their tears, feces and wounds”.
He went on to explain how the common house fly eats all kinds of old, rotting food, including animal feces, roadkill, rubbish and more.
When feeding, the house fills its crop, which Stoffolano compared to a “gas tank.”
However, instead of being a place for digestion to take place for the fly, it’s more of a place for storage.
This means that there aren’t many digestive enzymes involved, which would typically kill the majority of pathogens.
As part of the feeding process, when the fly wishes to eat some more, it pukes out some of its crop onto the new food it craves.
Stoffolano says that this can easily spread diseases because of all the pathogens they regurgitate.
But that’s not even all! The crop is a place where the microbes can develop antibacterial resistance.
This scenario could be a nightmare for us human beings upon getting infected by any pathogen.
The study’s author stresses that “It is the little things that can cause the problems. Our health depends on paying close attention to these flies that live with us.”
Currently, not much is known about flies’ potential to spread serious diseases, so the team of scientists hope for more research on the topic to be done in the near future.
