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HomePosts Tagged "Disease"

In thinking about preparing your family for survival after a disaster or emergency situation you can’t forget to consider their health. Your family’s health is affected by so much more than having adequate stores of food. Having the best gun for self-defense is great and important, but what if someone in your group comes down with an illness that was easily prevented? What if the killer that attacks you is a sinister little microorganism you never saw coming?

Of course, the health impacts vary with the event that caused the disaster. Flooding and Hurricanes would produce different health issues than a winter storm that knocked out the power. The subject of health though is always one that should be in your short-term plans for SHTF.

Sanitation

What is sanitation? Let’s just make this simple and say that the importance of sanitation is everything to do with getting rid of waste. In a grid-up scenario, most of us have access to a lot of systems to take care of sanitation for us. We have running water, toilets and garbage pick-up or landfills. If you don’t have any of those, you probably wouldn’t be on the internet reading this. Those systems do a pretty nice job of getting the trash and our waste far away from us and that is important. Without Sanitation, diseases quickly spread.

For example, after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, more than half a million people became ill with Cholera. That disease quickly spread into neighboring countries so bad. Cholera is a water-borne disease. In Haiti, where most people lacked public sewage systems or sanitary latrines after the disaster, people often drink from the same water source they use to bathe and defecate. People ill with cholera develop severe diarrhea and, without immediate treatment, can become dehydrated. The rapid dehydration can cause shock, which can lead to death.

How can we prevent that? Several ways, but one primary concern is to make sure our waste isn’t contaminating our drinking water. To do that, we have to have a plan for taking care of good old number 2.

 

Bathroom Facilities

The average human produces two to three pints of urine and one pound of feces every day. If you have a family of four or a group of twenty, that adds up quickly. Whatever the solution for removing waste we have to ensure that it will not contaminate any water supplies. A good rule of thumb is to bury waste at least 150 away from the nearest water source.

Here are a few different options for getting that waste safely out-of-the-way.

Toilet

As long as the septic lines aren’t clogged or backed up, you can still use your toilet. Actually, if you have a septic tank, you could conceivable use this in a grid-down scenario forever. Your toilet just needs water to flush everything down and that is a major reason people fill up bathtubs before a hurricane. The water isn’t so much for drinking, although you could since it came out of the tap (I know what is in my tub so I wouldn’t without a good filter) but you can easily use this to flush your toilet. Simply take a gallon bucket filled with water and pour it into the bowl when you are done. Gravity will do the rest. Assuming there is a radio after the disaster you can listen and see if the sewer lines are still functioning and this is only an option if water is not an issue.

Five Gallon Bucket

HSC_TOILET_BUCKET

5-Gallon bucket toilet

If you have ever been camping in the woods and used the bathroom by squatting you will appreciate that even having a bucket to sit on can make a world of difference. Sure, squatting will work in a pinch (no pun intended) but I am used to sitting on the throne and the next best thing would be sitting on something, anything as opposed to squatting. That’s just me. A five-gallon bucket only needs a proper toilet seat and you are in business. You can take the seat off your existing toilet and there are even kits pre-made with the lid that fits perfectly on your bucket without slipping. While this makes the act seem more like the good old days of your trusty porcelain friend, they do need to be cleaned out. Having dirt or sawdust to cover over the feces will reduce smell and flies and make it so you don’t have to clean as often.

Cat Hole

latrine

Cat Hole – No frills

Another camping favorite when we have a bigger group and a chair. The cat hole is most easily dug with a post-hole digger and you want to make it as deep as possible without getting into your water table. The process would be to dig the hole and fill it in with dirt after it becomes about 1/2 full of waste. Once the hole is dug, you can set a chair with a hole in it over the hole, hence the post hole digger since this will make a hole just big enough to drop the important stuff down, but your chair will still fit over it. This process would be repeated often if you had a large group. Don’t have a chair, just take one that you have and cut a hole in it or put your wood working skills to use and make a box with a hole and mount your toilet seat over the hole.

Slit Trench

This would be for larger groups who plan to cover the trench with more permanent toilet facilities. If you are ready for this option, you seem to have sanitation or at least a crew to dig a large trench covered.

No Toilet Paper?

Ah, the subject of so many blog posts and forum threads. Do you have enough toilet paper stored? What will you do when you run out of paper? It will happen eventually and you will be forced to get back to nature… Some items I have thought of are old phone books or catalogs. We’d be covered for a year on just the holiday junk mail catalogs alone. Some other preppers recommend a water sprayer which might work, but I haven’t tried that.

Trash

What trash will you have after the SHTF? I can think of lots of trash accumulating in the near term after a disaster and most people will fill up the large hefty bags and sit them on the corner or on the street. If the garbage services are no longer running, burning your trash would be suitable. I would be careful to salvage items that may come in use later which, if you think about it, could be almost anything. Glass or plastic containers that could be used to store water wouldn’t go into the recycling bin anymore. Tin or aluminum cans could also be re-purposed. I can see paper getting burned in the fire, but that may be something to save for the bathroom…

If you have other ideas or tips on sanitation, let us know in the comments. I look forward to hearing from you.

 

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In thinking about preparing your family for survival after a disaster or emergency situation you can’t forget to consider their health. Your family’s health is affected by so much more

The modern medical system is built on “just in time” shipping methods. The ability to get meds, resources, and people where they need to be in 24-48 hours is the main reason we have blooming populations of human beings on this planet.

We have had glimpses of what it would look like to lose our trucking fleet because of disaster. Even a moderate natural disaster can make roads impassable for days on end. Imagine what a nationwide collapse would do to trucking and shipping of medicines.

You know someone, right now, who would find themselves on death’s door without medications for 72 hours. We all know at least one person. Whether that be something like insulin, dialysis or even a simple blood pressure medication.

Grid Down Medicine Shortage

In something like a grid-down collapse, brought on by terrorists attacking our power grid, the disruptions would be cataclysmic and in a matter of days, you would find yourself looking for medicine, food and likely water. Medicine and food would be affected by the lack of shipping. As store shelves go dry there would be no more shipments to refill them. The water system and water processing facilities would also be offline without electricity.

You might have access to water, but you might not want to risk drinking it for fear of serious contamination. A simple infection from a waterborne pathogen could result in death without access to doctors or modern antibiotics.

Disease and Death Will Return

Everything changes and without preparations you and your loved ones will be at extreme risk. Without our modern shipping and medical system, people will get sick and die on a regular basis. Things like the flu and other viruses will kill people when they used to be cured by a quick trip to the doctors.

Doctors will be gone.

We have seen similar situations like this play out in war-zones all over the world. In Syria, today, people are facing these situations as the embattled nation has been reduced to near rubble. This from Doctorsoftheworld.org:

According to the U.N., one-third of Syrian hospitals have been shuttered since the conflict began and a staggering two-thirds of medical personnel have either fled or been unable to continue working. The repercussions of this breakdown on the health of the population are impossible to overestimate, and cannot be dealt with effectively until safe access for medical and public health personnel can be assured. https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/op-ed-by-board-president-dr-ron-waldman-healthcare-in-syria/


Medical Prepping is Essential

While things like food, water, and security through firearms often take the highest tiers in prepping, its clear medical prepping deserves its day in the sun. It’s hard to understand how preppers can put such an emphasis on high powered rifles for gunfights but not consider the aftermath of a gunfight. Things like trauma kits and tourniquets are how people will keep from bleeding to death in these scenarios.

Of course, we are not even talking about post-combat infections

DO YOU KNOW WHAT STEPS YOU NEED TO TAKE TO GET YOUR FAMILY PREPARED FOR A TIME WHEN DOCTORS HAVE GONE INTO HIDING?

Top Medical Prepping Mistakes to Avoid

With food storage you can put up calories and as long as your family likes the food you are storing you will have some answers for hunger. With medical preps it’s very different. There are particular things that need to be stored and many of them you have NEVER used before!

WHAT ABOUT FIRST AID SKILLS?

Without the right training and resources to turn to, you will never know the full extent of what you might need in a collapse of the medical system. Retailers offer us very basic first aid solutions that address limited situations.

Here are some of the most common medical prepping mistakes to avoid.

  • Depending on a store bought first aid kit
  • Stockpiling medications, you don’t know how to dose safely
  • Not training skills to complement your medical preps
  • Assuming there is someone out there who can help you
  • Not training family, as well (who will treat you?)

These mistakes are very common and mostly come from a place of ignorance. With so much information out there it’s hard to know where to look and what to learn first. When it comes to medical prepping it’s much easier to have a manual to turn to.

The breadth of knowledge is so vast its nearly impossible to commit much of it to memory. Having a reliable resource that you can turn to in these times of collapse and disaster will make all the difference.

DO YOU KNOW THE RESOURCES YOU NEED WHEN MEDICINE AND MEDICAL HELP ARE NO LONGER AN OPTIONS?

Conclusion

More and more people are realizing that our society and our civility are hardly as stable as we once thought. The foundations are cracked and in many places on our planet, full-scale collapse has already taken hold.

You need only look to Syria and Venezuela to see the most newsworthy cases of this. They are just the beginning.

Whether it comes from despotic governments, mother nature, the heavens or something we haven’t considered, we will be tested, and this age of excess will come to an end.

In that time, you are going to want to have a resource at your side. You are going to want a manual for preparing for these dark times. The Lost Book Of Remedies is our answer to those looking for such a resource.

This is not a fly by night 20-page eBook on prepping. The Lost Book Of Remedies is a complete guide to preparing for disaster and addressing situations during a collapse. Having a tangible resource that you can hold, feel and use on demand is going to make all the difference in the future.

We all feel vulnerable and limited by budgets and commitments. Prepping seems like an impossible task sometimes but the right resources can help. Now is the time to move prepping to the forefront.

The darkness is coming, and it will take each of us to shine a little light if we are going to survive it.

The Lost Book Of Remedies is the light at the end of the tunnel.

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Even a moderate natural disaster can make roads impassable for days on end. Imagine what a nationwide collapse would do to trucking and shipping of medicines.