Excerpt from book: II THE NATURAL ENEMIES OF THE TYPHOID AS with every other living creature, nature makes its own effort to limit the abundance of the fly under consideration, and the extraordinary facility for multiplication which the fly possesses is in turn the result of the instinctive effort of the organism to maintain its status in spite of the numerous enemies which confront it. The natural enemies of the house fly begin with the acme of the vertebrate series (man himself) and end with the lower forms of plant life, and we will begin our consideration of these agencies with the latter forms. Fungous Diseases In the autumn it is a matter of common observation that many flies in houses and on the windows become sluggish and frequently die in such positions. The sluggishness may be accounted for in a measure by the advent of cold weather, and as a matter of fact cold weather frequently drives indoors other species of flies of a more sluggish nature than the house fly. In this way the so-called cluster fly (Pollenia rudis), a rather sluggish species, which will be referred to in another chapter, is frequently found in houses in the autumn. But the principal cause of the sluggishness on the part of the house fly in the autumn is the attack of fungous diseases. Sometimes they are found to be dead without any evidence of the cause of death. Later they are seen to be surrounded by a white fungus growth. There is a group of fungi belonging to the En- tomophthoreae, many of which are parasitic upon insects. There are several genera in this group, but the only one which need be considered at present is the genus Empusa. The fungi of this group have been studied by Dr. Roland Thaxter of Harvard University, and it is from his writings that the following statements have been drawn.

This book is designed primarily as a textbook for graduate and postgraduate courses in Medical, Public Health and Veterinary Entomology. Its uniqueness is that its emphasis is on disease as opposed to arthropods. It includes general discussions of epidemiology, transmission, disease control, vector control and disease surveillance. In addition, it contains chapters oriented towards the many specific arthropod-borne diseases. Furthermore, the book discusses the many direct impacts that parasitic insects have on human and animal health. The arthropods themselves are dealt with in two introductory chapters.

Microbiome research has focused on microorganisms that live within the human body and their effects on health. During the last few years, the quantification of microbiome composition in different environments has been facilitated by the advent of high throughput sequencing technologies. The statistical challenges include computational difficulties due to the high volume of data; normalization and quantification of metabolic abundances, relative taxa and bacterial genes; high-dimensionality; multivariate analysis; the inherently compositional nature of the data; and the proper utilization of complementary phylogenetic information. This has resulted in an explosion of statistical approaches aimed at tackling the unique opportunities and challenges presented by microbiome data. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in statistical and informatics technologies for microbiome research. In addition to reviewing demonstrably successful cutting-edge methods, particular emphasis is placed on examples in R that rely on available statistical packages for microbiome data. With its wide-ranging approach, the book benefits not only trained statisticians in academia and industry involved in microbiome research, but also other scientists working in microbiomics and in related fields.