The Four Most Likely Ways You Can Die If The SHTF

SHTF Plan ^ | 6-30-2011 | Tess Pennington

[blam]

The Four Most Likely Ways You Can Die If The SHTF

Tess Pennington
June 30th, 2011
Ready Nutrition

The subject of survival in a long term disaster goes beyond having stockpiles of beans, bullets and band-aids. Those that do survive during a long term emergency will no doubt be tried and tested with a great many things. One of those trying scenarios is dealing with death.

Zombie attacks seem to be a prevalent theme for preppers to prepare for. In fact, the CDC has even posted a preparedness article on how to ward off zombie attacks. While I believe these zombies will likely take the form of substance abusers, mental patients, chronically ill or diseased, and desperate individuals whose basic needs have not been met, they will die out in the first few months of an onset of a major disaster, and there presence will rarely be an issue in a long term situation.

In reality, a majority of those that will die during a long-term disaster will be from illnesses brought on by acute respiratory infections due to cramped living conditions, poor water conditions (or lack of), or bacterial infections from wounds. If we survive a major disaster, America would become a third world country and the aftermath of such a scenario will be similar to those living in Africa, Ethiopia and India.

Illness Due to Poor Water Conditions

Typically, any diseases that are brought on by lack of sanitation and hygiene are controllable and preventable. In a disaster where water sources are compromised, people within a 50 mile radius could be adversely impacted by illness and disease if just one person incorrectly handles water or incorrectly disposes of waste. Contaminated water, poor sanitation and/or lack of hygeine leads to diseases such as Hepatitis A, viral gastroenteritis, cholera, Shigellosis, typhoid, Diphtheria and polio. If these diseases affect enough people, an epidemic will ensue.

Dehydration and diarrhea are also water-related matters to contend with. Those without adequate water conditions and/or are suffering from disease brought on by poor water conditions could quickly dehydrate. These types of illnesses typically affect at-risk populations such as children, the sick and the elderly. Young children in particular are at high risk for diarrhea and other food- and waterborne illnesses because of limited pre-existing immunity and behavioral factors such as frequent hand-to-mouth contact. The greatest risk to an infant with diarrhea and vomiting is dehydration. In addition, fever or increased ambient temperature increases fluid losses and speeds dehydration. Having knowledge beforehand on how to properly clean drinking water and food, and the symptomatology and treatment of these types of diseases can prevent further outbreaks from occurring.

Recommended preparedness items: water filtration systems, water purification tablets, chlorine granules, bleach, electrolyte or rehydration powders, anti-diarrea medicines.

Malnutrition

Malnutrition from either improper water conditions or from lack of nutrients is also a large killer amongst those in impoverished communities. Medical experts say there is a symbiotic relationship between malnutrition and diarreah. Malnutrition increases the severity of diarrhea while diarrhea can cause malnutrition. Either way, prevention for both of these health issues is key.

Those that are malnourished are more suseptible to illness and disease. Individuals who are malnourished will also be vitamin deficient and their health is likely to regress further. Those who survive from malnutrition are permanently affected by this disease and may suffer from recurring sickness, faltering growth, poor brain development, increased tooth decay, reduced strength and work capacity, and increased chance of chronic diseases in adulthood. Adult women with this condition will give birth to underweight babies.

Recommended preparedness items: dietary supplements, vitamin powders, seeds for sprouting or seeds for fresh vegetables and fruits, survival bars, knowledge of alternative means to attain vitamins

Acute Respiratory Infections

Upper respiratory infections (URI) will also be a leading cause of death in a long term disaster. Upper respiratory infections include: colds, flu, sore throat, coughs and bronchitis can usually be cured with additional liquids, rest and nourishment. Allowing the illness to exacerbate will lead to secondary infections such as bacterial pneumonia. The germs from pneumonia are easily spread from an infected person to others by coughing or sneezing or through close contact. A major concern about respiratory infections is that there are many drug resistant strands of viruses, bacterias and diseases (including tuberculosis), that regular medicine will not cure. In a long term disaster situation, many could perish.

To properly prepare for this type of medical situation, learn about the more prevalent viruses and bacterias in your country and how to prevent them in order to provide a healthy living environment in a long term situation.

Not only are URI’s a concern but other air-borne diseases such as tuberculosis will likely fester during a long term scenario. In regular non-SHTF times, treatment for tuberculosis requires 6-12 months of medication. In a long term emergency, chances of surviving tuberculosis are slim. The best way to prevent tuberculosis is adequate nutrition, vitamin D and living in a properly ventilated shelter.

Survival groups that have multiple people living under one roof will only increase the likelihood of passing air-borne infections and diseases to one another. In addition, those in an at-risk group (elderly, immuno-deficient, infants) are more likely to catch illnesses. If a survival group is sharing a home, an infirmary or sick room should be prepared for those who have fallen ill. Isolating the person who is ill will limit exposure to the other members of the group. Adequate nutrition, water, rest, good sanitary practices and ventilation of the home is essential in curbing this.

Recommended preparedness items: decongestants, expectorants, upper respiratory medicines, antibiotics (for secondary and bacterial infections), knowledge on medicinal herbs, prepare a sick room at your survival homestead

Infections From Wounds

Open injuries have the potential for serious bacterial wound infections, including gas gangrene and tetanus, and these in turn may lead to long term disabilities, chronic wound or bone infection, and death. Anitibiotics will be few and far between and will be more precious than gold. Without proper medicines, antiseptic and knowledge on proper medical procedures, many will die of bacterial infections. Learning medical skills, gaining knowledge on natural medicines and alternative medical antiseptic (i.e., Dakin’s Solution) before a disaster occurs could help people survive from wound infections. Also, ensuring the area that you treat medical emergencies is clean and as sterile as possible may also prevent bacterial infections.

Recommended preparedness items: stock up on maxi pads for wound absorption, gauze, celox, antibiotics, suture needles and other basic first aid supplies

Additionally, consider developing the following skills: basic first aid class, sign up for EMT classes in your community, an off-grid medical care class such as those offered by onPoint Tactical. Also, consider investing in books such as When There is No Doctor and When There is No Dentist

Also look into making your own antiseptics utilizing alcohol distillation, such as the custom made units from LNL Protekt.

These illnesses (provided above) have impacted countries all over the world. These illness and conditions, coupled with unsanitary living conditions such as substandard sanitation, inadequate food and water supplies and poor hygiene, make disaster-affected people especially vulnerable to disease. These illnesses will affect us no matter what part of the world we live in, what socio-economic status we currently hold, and no matter how prepared we think we are.

Understanding what can happen and being prepared when it does is absolutely essential. The last thing we want to do when a serious condition arises is to panic. Preparing your supplies, developing your skills and educating the rest of your family and preparedness group on how to prevent, identify and counteract these serious conditions will provide a significant boost to your ability to survive if the worst happens.

Recommended Reading:

Patriot Nurse: 5 Diseases that Will Explode WTSHTF

Prevention and Management of Wound Infections

Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in Emergencies

[CholeraJoe]

Umm, excuse me, but did you read the ingredients? It calls for 2 tablespoons of bottled lemon juice per quart. The lemon juice is acidic and adds enough acid to make them safe to can in a boiling water bath.

According to the USDA canning guidelines, tomatoes are better when canned with a pressure canner. "Recommendation: Use of a pressure canner will result in higher quality and more nutritious canned tomato products. If your pressure canner cannot be operated above 15 PSI, select a process time at a lower pressure." Link to PDF

I'm certainly not willing to take a chance with Botulism, since the survival rate is only about 10%.

[Ratman83]

bttt

[bgill]

The garbage and pests worried me more than the hordes. Yikes!

Same here. Garbage can be burned and buried but too many in the cities haven't a clue about that and would let it pill up and whine that the garbage trucks aren't hauling it away for them. That's when the diseases will start spreading. Same thing with they turn the faucet and there's no water. Handwashing is very important.

[Georgia Girl 2]

Tetracyclin is the only antibiotic that can actually hurt you when it goes past the expiration date. Cipro and Amoxacillin are two very good broad spectrum antibiotics to stock up on. You can purchase these drugs through the online Canadian Pharmacy without a prescription as well as some pain killers.

[JDW11235]

Agreed. Garbage is simple (though not necessarilly easy), to eliminate. My great grandma, for example had a system of three components. Any food waste, etc. went to the compost heap. Anything that could burn went into the burn drum (oil barrel), anything else (very little) went to the garbage.

Regarding handwashing, one simple way would be to setup 5 gallon buckets, in a sytem like the jews had for handwashing. With a series of a few buckets (I believe they had 7), you can wash in the first, and then rinse very well in the last few. That way, you only have to swap out the dirtiest buckets every once in a while. (Bleach or a disinfectant could be put into one).

It’s like washing clothes in a bucket (I did for some time, once). You just get two buckets (#1 and #2). The first (#1) bucket you wash in. Then move to the second (#2) clean water bucket. Then dump out the first (#1), and fill with clean water, and rinse again. The first rinse bucket (#2), then becomes your wash bucket, and the new rinse (#1-originally the wash bucket) becomes the rinse bucket, and the process repeats.

You could easily do that with the hand washing, dumping out and cleaning/refilling only the dirtiest bucket, and making it your new clean bucket (with some bleach/sanitizer, etc). That way you can have clean hands most of the time, but not have to use any excess water run down the drain. Also that dirty bucket being dumped out could be used to flush the toilet, so, there’s lots of options.

[JDW11235]

You can always legally buy antibiotics for your pets, like fish, if they need them too...

[Mad Dawgg]

"and you’re willing to share the design?"

Yeah, However I got it from youtube. Some guy was making a moonshine still. I used his design and refined it a bit.

Here is the link: http://youtu.be/viaizr5GVdg to the original video I got the idea from.

The way I refined the design was to get a some copper pipe fittings that allowed me to connect the coiled copper pipe to the pressure cooker using a threaded connector thus allowing me to use a stainless steel nut on the interior of the pressure cooker eliminating the threat of lead contaminates yet providing a much more stable connection than the "cork" method provides.

Further I use a threaded water tap/faucet on the opposite end of the tube and another threaded connector and mounted it via a hole I drilled in the plastic bucket. This allows me to fill the sump with water instead of ice and eliminate the "sump water" leaking out around the copper tube sticking out the unsealed hole in the bucket. (you don't need ice in the sump to distill water wherein apparently the colder temps are desired when distilling alcohol)

interior of sump (plastic 5 gallon bucket)

faucet on exterior of sump (plastic 5 gallon bucket)

opposite end of coil (pressure cooker end)

top of pressure cooker (where sump coil connects)

interior connection of pressure cooker

(note the thermometer connection also. Such is not needed for water distillation but I did not know that when I made this one. All further models I made don't have one.)

See the basic idea is to turn the water into steam and then cool the steam back down so it changes back to water.

I used about 20 feet total of copper piping.

[MrB]

Tetracyclin is the only antibiotic that can actually hurt you when it goes past the expiration date.

Oft repeated, but really never studied.
This assertion is based on one case where someone died of renal failure and they found that he had taken expired tetracycline. There was never a definitive cause/effect relationship established.

[Kartographer]

I hope many of my fellow FReepers are prepping so that as many Patriots come out the otherside as possible.

If you haven’t already it’s time to prepare. You needed to be stocking up on food guns, ammo, basic household supplies like soap, papergoods, cleaning supplies, good sturdy clothes including extra socks, underwear and extra shoes and boots, a extra couple changes of oil and filters for your car, tools, things you buy everyday start buying two and put one up.

If you are just starting or an old hand at prepping I like to recomend that you look over my Preparedness Manual which you can down load at:

http://www.tomeaker.com/kart/preparedness1i.pdf

I think that we are at the very least in for a collapse much like that of Argentina’s ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yerKMQc7-w&feature=grec_index), but as a armed society with a very large entitlement minded population our collapse will be much more violent and I see many many small business wiped out by flash mob looting, and large scale violence (look at what happened just this past Memorial Day weekend)and then there is this is going on in Chicago:”Emanuel said he spoke with McCarthy over the weekend and again this morning about the situation. The mayor said the city’s reputation as a safe place to work and shop downtown is being endangered by the thuggery. Many of the attacks are happening near the biggest tourist and shopping attractions in the city.

But, CBS 2’s Jim Williams reports, the problem of mob attacks downtown is much bigger than the weekend beatings, according to beat cops who wanted to remain anonymous.”

And it’s not just Chicago, but Washington DC, Las Vegas, St Paul, Philadelphia and on most major big ‘Blue’ cities are increasingly reporting such flash mobs and gang muggings. Look what happened just this past weekend in Peoria, Il:

http://peoriachronicle.com/2011/06/25/peorians-living-in-fear/

Teenage Flash Mob Robberies on the Rise:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/06/18/top-five-most-brazen-flash-mob-robberies/

Rash of violence isn’t flash mobs, it’s wilding

http://www.suntimes.com/news/roeper/5826624-417/rash-of-violence-isnt-flash-mobs-its-wilding.html

Teens in a mob assault and rob Center City patrons

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20110629_Teens_in_a_mob_assault_and_rob_Center_City_patrons.html

I see what I call ‘Pocket Pogroms’ taking place in many big ‘Blue’ cities and if you aren’t a “0bamamite yutes” it’s going to get Reginald Denny bad for you very quickly.

As the LDS say “When the emergency is upon us the time for preparedness has past.”

Or as the bible says: A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.
NIV Proverbs 22:3

“There is no greater disaster than to underestimate danger.

Underestimation can be fatal.”

[Georgia Girl 2]

I have done a lot of online searching and if you don’t mind the generic you can order almost any popular drug. I am going to order 1 year of all of my Mom’s drugs in case we can’t get to a pharmacy. You can get plavix, Norvast, Cynthroid and most of the statins. Its not agains’t the law. I order Evista online without a prescription all the time. And Robaxin which is a muscle relaxer.

[Ratman83]

Will somebody please explain to me what a zombie is? Look to the White House and there is your answer.

[metmom]

Works for me.

[The Duke]

Why is distillation more important than simply boiling? Are there scenarios which imagine massive quantities of nonbiological contaminants? Or simply poisonous biological byproducts, like tomain (sp?)

The issue with distillation *and* boiling is FUEL. Eventually you can/will run out of fuel, or will be foraging far afield for it. Even it it is available, obtaining it will consume your valuable time. In terms of cost-effectiveness and overall effectiveness I can't recommend the Katadyne "pocket filter" highly enough - with a pore size of .2 microns, it's one of the most serious water filters on the planet.

Also, I can't recommend highly enough the use of calcium hypochlorite to sanitize water (after its been filtered).

Regarding distillation, I recommend using Mother Nature's own distillation process (aka. collecting rain water).

1) Collect rain water
2) Pre-filter the rain water through a cotton cloth
3) Filter that water through a TEOTWAWKI-quality water filter
4) Purify with bleach that has been made from calcium hychlorite.

Regarding sanitation:

1) Have a "sanitation plan" in place
2) Have a couple of bags of lime ready to use
3) Understand the rules for making and locating latrines
4) Be prepared to deal with diarrhea (knowing "Oral Rehydration Therapy" can save lives).
5) Strongly enforce basic sanitation habits among everyone in the group.

[DBrow]

“My teenage son is a type 1 diabetic and needs insulin to survive.”

Insulin used to be extracted from cow, sheep, or goat pancreas.

Learning how to do that might be a sell-able skill when the troubles begin. Along with animal husbandry and butchering.

[dangus]

TEOTWAWKI?

[blam]

"Tomatoes don’t need to be pressure cooked they are acidic and you also add some salt to them. Other non-acidic food need pressure canning though, meats, beans, cheese, corn, ect.. Anything with lots of sugar, acid, lots of salt(can’t remember how much, I think it was 10% of volume), vinegar don’t need the pressure canner. Best thing to do is just buy a good canning book. "

Thanks, I know that. I've eaten home grown and home canned vegetables most of my life. I am very familiar with canning.

[blam]

"Many common antibiotics are available from farm supply sources, in bulk quantities, without a prescription and cheaper than the pharmacy. "

Yup. I used these guys Without a prescription) for years: CalVet Supply

[DBrow]

Most of those little icold packs also contain ammonium nittrate as the cooling ingredient. It has many uses besides cold.

[tacticalogic]

If you live in the city, I don’t see much point in stockpiling more of anything than you can take with you. The cities are going to burn.

[MsLady]

Yea, it’s not the dying so much as it is the length and the suffering before hand. Just horrific to think of what might be if this all collapses. I’d say it would never get to the point your talking about though. Just a thought. I think people in their panic would pic a leader who would promise them away out of the mess. Even if that leader was the devil himself. All I can say is God help us.