Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 10, 1995 TAG: 9508100029
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A: Because they drool so much, for one thing. Drooling up a storm is a good way to wash out all the anaerobic bacteria that cause bad breath. (We recommend that adults do this only in the privacy of their homes.)
``The stuff that smells actually can be dissolved in water very nicely, and it can be washed away,'' says Jon Richter, director of the Richter Center for the Treatment of Breath Disorders, in Philadelphia (it is important to remember to put a comma after ``Disorders'').
Bad breath often comes from bacteria at the back of the tongue. These germs can't survive contact with oxygen. In an adult, they are often snugly sealed beneath a layer of mucus. If the mouth is otherwise dry, nothing disturbs the mucus to wash away the bacteria. Babies, though, rarely have dry mouths.
Another advantage babies have is: No teeth. In an adult, proteins seep from the gums at the base of teeth. Bacteria eat the proteins, and excrete sulfur compounds that smell bad. Babies aren't pumping proteins into their mouths the way adults are.
``Until you have teeth, you're unlikely to have sufficient protein'' for the bad bacteria, Richter says.
Still, the absence of bad breath in small children is something that isn't completely understood. Moreover, there are exceptions to the rule. Some children do have bouts of bad breath. Often that's a sign of an infection, or even a foreign body up the nose. (Kids will be kids.)
Until they figure out precisely why most babies don't have bad breath, we are going to assume it's just because they're so darn sweet.
|n n| Q: Why do flies like to sit on the backs and rumps of cows and horses?
A: We are not sure who has it worse, the animal or the bug.
A typical cow is often covered with disgusting, flitty, biting little pests that are doing everything in their power to ruin what would otherwise be a pastoral existence.
But would you rather be a fly, and live most of your life on a cow's butt?
(We think we'll go with being a mammal, and pray for rain.)
Naturally we called the federal government's Midwest Livestock Insects Research Laboratory in Lincoln, Neb., where we learned from Steve Skoda, an entomologist, that the kind of flies routinely seen on cows are called ``horn flies.''
They don't do much, these horn flies. They are shockingly ambitionless.
``Ninety percent of the time they're just sitting there. But that other 10 percent of the time they're feeding. They have mouth parts real similar to a mosquito's, and they pierce through the skin and take blood meals,'' Skoda said.
Chris Thompson, an entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told us that flies also like to drink up cow sweat, because it has salt in it. A few flies just hang around waiting for the cow pie to hit the pasture. That's where they lay the maggot eggs. (We are just reporting the facts here. We didn't design this system.)
``The cow lays a patty and they are there to lay their eggs into it,'' says Thompson. ``It's good nutrient. There's lots of food in there.''
One thing that both our experts emphasized is that there are a lot of different types of flies - in fact upwards of 120,000 species.
``We got flies that sit on the beach and scrape algae off the rock. We got flies that are internal parasites of bats,'' Thompson said.
Thompson told us about the wobble fly. This kind of fly will lay its eggs on the hoof of a cow. The cow then licks the hoof because it's irritated. The eggs stick to the cow's tongue and before you know it they're in the digestive tract.
The eggs hatch. The maggots bore their way out of the digestive tract and into the muscles of the cow's back, near the surface. There they pupate, and before you know it an adult fly has popped out of the cow's back.
Our feeling is, if a creature is going to go through that much trouble, it out to wind up at the very least a butterfly.
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB