Flying Insect

While not usually a serious health threat, common flying insects can spread germs and contaminate food. Flies, for example, can lay their eggs in garbage cans and near source of food and moisture. These eggs rapidly lead to magots and more flies.

True flies are insects of the order Diptera. Diptera is a large order containing an estimated 1,000,000 species including horseflies, crane flies, hover flies, and others, although only about 125,000 species have been described.

Diptera is one of the major insect orders and of considerable ecological and human importance. Flies are important pollinators, Fruit flies are used as model organisms in research, but less benignly,

mosquitoes are vectors for malaria, dengue, West Nile fever, yellow fever, encephalitis, and other infectious diseases; and houseflies, commensal with humans all over the world, spread food-borne illnesses.

Flies can be annoyances especially in some parts of the world where they can occur in large numbers, buzzing and settling on the skin or eyes to bite or seek fluids. Larger flies such as tsetse flies and

screwworms cause significant economic harm to cattle. Blowfly larvae, known as gentles, and other dipteran larvae, known more generally as maggots, are used as fishing bait and as food for carnivorous animals. They are also used in medicine in debridement to clean wounds.