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Which Is Worse? A Fly Or A Roach In Your Food?

Flies carry more diseases - like e coli and salmonella. Read this to find out where they pick it up and how they transmit it to your food.
Flies carry more disease than roaches.

GREENSBORO, NC -- Which of the following would make you stop chowing down if you spied one while you were in a restaurant? A rodent, a cockroach, flies or ants?

In an Orkin poll, 61 percent of people said they'd keep eating if a fly landed on their food, but you shouldn't! The fly is the worst offender!

Yes - the lowly fly. And it represents a serious health hazard. Orkin entomologist Dr. Ron Harrison said, "Flies are serious and disease transmitters and need to be controlled." So how does your food get contaminated? Harrison said, "The mama lays her eggs on a food source that the maggots or the larvae would like to eat, and typically, that's feces. [...] And so while she's laying her eggs there, she picks up particles of the feces as well as the diseases that are associated with the feces like e coli, salmonella, diarrhea, diphtheria. [...] So then she leaves after she laid her eggs and finds a food source for herself, and at that time she deposits those things she got from the feces and that's how we pick up that in our food. That's what makes them so disgusting."

Dr. Harrison said it only takes a matter of seconds for those germs or particles to transfer to our food. And you may have gotten sick and not even realized it. He said, "What we find out is you've been exposed to e coli or salmonella in low levels that don't cause you such dramatic sickness. But if you think about it, I'm just not feeling good today, that is what's associated with a fly that's deposited a small amount on your food."

So if the fly's the worst offender, what about the cockroach? Why are they not as bad? Dr. Harrison says they typically don't target the kinds of foods humans eat. But the main difference is in the transmission, or the lack of it. He said, "They don't get a disease that would be harmful to humans on their body and then transfer it to us, unlike flies, which typically are around feces which have numerous amounts of diseases that are associated with it."

Dr. Harrison had lots more to say. In this web extra he talks about why he thinks people are more okay with flies than roaches. He even talks about some possible ways to get rid of flies. Watch the video below to hear what he has to say. (Warning: the audio and video is out of sync due to technical difficulties with the Skype interview.)

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