House Fly : A vector

House Fly ( In the light of a Hadith)

Sayings of Prophet (peace be upon Him) :
If a fly falls into one of your containers ( of food or drinks), immerse it completely (falyaghmis-hu kullahu) before removing it, for under one of its wings there is venom and under another there is its antidote.


House fly is a common vector for the spread of diseases like Typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery and some fevers. The concept of House fly being a vector made known to the world some where in the 18th or 19th Century AD.

But Muslims got this Idea of House Fly being a vector much earlier to that from the sayings of Prophet PBEH. Not only that, the above saying gives the clue that the other wing contain anti microbial agents which neutralizes the pathogenesis of the first wing.

Now It has been proved in modern times without doubt that the other wing of the fly contain some bacteriophagic property, so flies are not only pathogenic carriers but also carrier of micro biota that can be beneficent. The fly microbiota were described as ”longitudinal yeast cells” living as parasites inside their bellies. These yeast cells in order to perpetuate their life cycle, protrude through certain respiratory tubules of the fly. If the fly is dipped in a liquid , the cells burst into the fluid and the content of these cells is an antidote for the pathogens which the fly carries. These fly microbiota are bacteriophagic or “germ eating”. Bacteriophages are Viruses of the Viruses. They attack viruses and bacteria. They can be selected and bred to kill specific organisms. The Viruses infect a bacterium, replicate and fill the bacterial cell with new copies of the virus and then break through the bacterium’s cell wall, causing it to burst. The existence of similar bacteria killing mechanism in two bacteriophages suggests that antibiotics for human infections might be designed on the basis of these cell wall- destroying proteins. ( Source: Science 292 ( June 2001) p. 2326-2329).

Now the question arises? Is the fly ritually filthy (Najis- in arabic) . No. the Islamic Jurist concur that the fly is pure( al-dhubab tahir) and does not defile a liquid even if its quantity is small and even if it dies in it except, according to al-shafi, if one of the aspects of the liquid is affected ( smell, colour, taste) Sharah al-sunna (11: 260-261).

In Homeopathic treatment there are medicines which have been extracted by directly immersing whole body of the flies and insects like Apis mellifica and Cockroaches e.g Blatta Orientalis and Blatta Americana. Which have been proved beneficial in diseases like angioneurotic aedema and asthma or upper respiratory disease respectively.


Bacteriophagic medicine was available in the West before the forties but was discontinued when penicillin and other 'miracle antibiotics' came out. Bacteriophages continued to flourish in Eastern Europe as an over-the-counter medicine. The 'O1-phage' has been used for diagnosis of all Salmonella types while the prophylaxis of Shigella dysentery was conducted with the help of phages. Annales Immunologiae Hungaricae No. 9 (1966) in German.
'Phage therapy' is now making a comeback in the West:
First named in 1917 by researcher Felix d'Herelle at France's Pasteur Institute, bacteriophages (or just phages for short) are viruses that prey upon bacteria. They have a simple structure - a DNA-filled head attached by a shaft to spidery 'legs' that are used to grip onto the surface of a bacterium. Once a phage latches onto a bacterium, it injects its payload of genetic material into the bacterium's innards. The bacterium then begins to rapidly produce 'daughter' copies of the phage -- until the bacterium becomes too full and ruptures, sending hundreds of new phage particles into the open world.
Doctors used phages as medical treatment for illnesses ranging from cholera to typhoid fevers. In some cases, a liquid containing the phage was poured into an open wound. In others, they were given orally, via aerosol, or injected. In some cases, the treatments worked well - in others, they did not. When antibiotics came into the mainstream, phage therapy largely faded in the west.
However, researchers in eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union, continued their studies of the potential healing properties of phages. And now that strains of bacteria resistant to standard antibiotics are on the rise, the idea of phage therapy has been getting more attention in the worldwide medical community. Several biotechnology companies have been formed in the U.S. to develop bacteriophage-based treatments - many of them drawing on the expertise of researchers from eastern Europe.'
Research on the medical application of bacteriophages is now considered to be in its most promising stage. A University of Pittsburgh researcher said in June 2001, 'Given the sheer number and variety of bacteriophages lurking on the planet, the viruses may represent a sizable untapped reservoir of new therapeutics.' Science 292 (June 2001) p. 2326-2329.
Possibilities for use of bacteriophages in disease control is discussed in the article 'Smaller Fleas... Ad infinitum: Therapeutic Bacteriophage Redux' in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [PNAS] Vol. 93 No. 8 (April 16, 1996), 3167-8.
In the two world wars the wounds of soldiers exposed to flies were observed to heal and scar faster than the wounds of unexposed soldiers. Even today, fly larvae, or maggots, are used medicinally to clean up festering wounds. They only eat dead tissue and leave healthy tissue alone.