If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably had moments where you grab a bowl of rice or have your parents set food nearby, but you don’t eat it right away because you’re caught up in a final match with your friends. But sometimes, that “final match” isn’t just one game, it could be two, three, four, five, or even more if you keep losing. Meanwhile, your bowl of rice sits there, forgotten, becoming a hangout spot for wandering flies.
So what would you do if you noticed a fly land on your food? Would you toss the whole bowl, scoop out the part the fly touched, or just keep eating like nothing happened? Most people usually go with the third option, thinking that just shooing the fly away is enough to keep their food safe. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. These tiny flies bring way more harm than their small size suggests.
In this article, I’ll break down four major dangers to help you understand what really happens when a fly lands on your food. Hopefully, this will remind you to eat before your game or clean up your food after you finish playing.
Flies Can Vomit on Your Food
If you didn’t know, flies eat by sucking up liquids through their tube-shaped mouths. Because of this shape, they need to turn solid food into liquid first. To do that, they inject saliva into your food, and that saliva can contain anything they’ve eaten before, like rotten meat or even feces.
Flies Can Lay Eggs on Your Food
Leftover food you save for the next day can become a perfect breeding ground for flies to lay eggs. After a while, those tiny eggs hatch into baby flies (maggots or larvae). You probably already know how harmful it is to accidentally eat them. So remember to store leftovers in the fridge or cover them with a food cover or similar items if you don’t want to invite flies into your home.
Fly Legs and Wings Are Covered in Bacteria
You probably know flies carry a lot of bacteria inside them, but did you know the highest concentration is actually on their surface? According to Nanyang Technological University, just one step from a fly’s hundreds of steps can leave behind dozens of bacteria. This means anything a fly has touched could be contaminated.
Flies Carry Over 60 Different Diseases
The flies you often see buzzing around your home can spread at least 65 different diseases to humans just by crawling from garbage bags to your food. These include dysentery, diarrhea, cholera, and leprosy. It’s not just humans who are at risk, animals like chickens and pigs can get infected too.
In short, when a fly lands on your food, it leaves behind more trouble than you might think, and you can’t just brush it off and keep eating. So will you change your habits or keep doing the same? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
Thanks for reading!
Source: brightside
