Clean Up Week was instituted to eliminate or reduce the population of the house fly. This editorial comment was published in the Lykens Standard, April 17, 1925:
STATEMENT ON CLEAN UP
In many ways institutions are really households on a large scale – at least most of them have storerooms and cellars, garbage cans and back years, and certainly flies are no respectors of buildings when they see unscreened windows.
All the items of the Clean Up Week program merit the attention of the institutions in the State. If the Superintendent of an institution isn’t interested, Board members and other citizens should stimulate and encourage action.
Let Clean Up Week be observed not only in every private household in the community but in every hospital, jail, alshouse, old peoples’ home, children’t home and training school thruut the state.
Debris and waste are not only unsightly, but in most instances are serious hazards from fire and other natural agencies. Accumulate inflammable material in the woods needs but a spark during the dry season to start a serious fire. Wood debris is a favorite breeding place for destructive insects. The designation of Clean Up Week should stimulate us to the removal or destruction of all unsightly or hazardous debris whether in woods or yard. Nature is at her best when she can work in an orderly unencumbered manner.
Year by year since the inauguration of community fly campaigns the summer fly population of Pennsylvania has been decreasing. Coincidentally there has been a lessening of fly borne diseases, notably intestinal disturbances of infancy.
The annual Clean Up Week in addition to its general sanitary and aesthetic advantages will result in the sestruction of fly breeding places and will be the advance movement of the state wide fly extermination campaign of 1925.
Flies breed in filth – its removal means no breeding places. No breeding places means no flies. Help guard the cradle by the destruction of childhood’s greatest enemy, “the housefly.”
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News article from Newspapers.com.
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