Sanitary Entomology; the entomology of disease, hygiene and sanitation
William Dwight Pierce
eBook
.............INDUSTRIAL SANITATIONMany industries have important entomological sanitary problems in the preservation of their products from insect contamination and in the eff'orts to conform to sanitary regulations. There are many times when they would be able to use the services of a consulting sanitary entomologist to advantage.The keynote of industry today is the prevention or utilization of waste. Insect depredations on food products cause waste because the public does not want polluted food, and because sanitary inspectors arc becoming more and more alive to the menace to health from insect polluted foods.It is not generally understood that the presence of weevils and worms in cereal foods may do more than destroy the food. The evidence isgrowing against these insects from the sanitary standpoint. Some of these insects contain substances in their bodies which are highly toxic, as for instance Sitophilus granarius, tlie granary weevil, contains the poisonous substance cantharidin. There are numerous instances of the sickening of animals from eating weevily grain. Still more important is the fact that where grain is accessible both to rodents and insects, certain parasitic worms pass out in the feces of the rodent in the egg stage, are eaten by the insect larvae in the grain, pass part of their life cycle in the insect, and the insect is then possibly eaten by a rodent, in which the worm completes its life cycle; or sometimes in our breakfast foods we eat these parasitized insects and become infected with the worms. For example, the rat tapeworm, Hymenolepis diminuta (Rudolphi) infests various species of rats, but sometimes is found in man. Joyeux has proved that its commonest intermediate host is the meal moth, Asopia farinalis, which becomes infected by eating the tapeworm eggs, in the larval stage. Grassi and Rovelli found the cysticercoid in the larva and adult of this moth and also in the earwig, Anisolabis annulipes and the beetles Akis spinosa and Scaurus striatus. Joyeux found that the adults of the granary beetle, Tenehrio molitor, easily took up the eggs. A cysticercoid or larval stage resembling the mouse tapeworm Hymenolepis microstoma (Dujardin) has been found by Grassi and Rovelli in the beetle Tenehrio molitor.The whole problem, therefore, of the control of stored food product insects is of vital importance to the manufacturers of food.Syrup factories, sugar mills and refineries, ice cream factories, creameries, and candy factories offer great attractions to flies which may alight on the exposed products and deposit with their feet, or in their vomit or excreta, germs of disease taken up elsewhere, perhaps days before when the fly was a larva breeding in excrement, and these germs may find the sweets excellent culture media for extensive growth. Extraordinary means must be devised to keep flies away from such products.Packinghouses offer abundant attractions to many kinds of insects, many of which are serious disease carriers.Railroad trains are the means of conveying from place to place disease-carrying mosquitoes, flies, roaches, fleas, lice, bedbugs, and mites. Fumigation of railway cars is an essential entomological control measure.Dairies are often found to be the foci of the spread of typhoid fever, and knowing the propensity of the house fly we can sec how readily it can carry the organisms from the stools of a sick person to the milk pails in the dairy. There needs to be rigid control of flies in all dairies.These are but examples of many industries which have problems in sanitary entomology................