A highly communicable pandemic would have the potential to travel this world and back again in a matter of 48 hours. I make this bold prediction just based on international business travel. This does not take into account tourism. If it reared its head in a place like China or the US, it would be the worst-case scenario. The blessing with something like Ebola is that it is in Africa and the population as well as tourism and business travel pales in comparison to places like US and China.
There can be an overwhelming number of items to consider when preparing for a pandemic. This is particularly true for those who have little medical knowledge. It may all seem foreign. To combat this confusion, I thought it necessary that we break up our preps into three very distinct categories.
Plastic Sheeting is one of the most important items to have an abundance of in the home. It can do things as simple as separate a few rooms to becoming a way to safely transport those who have died from the pandemic. The sheeting can also be used to cover windows and doors if the pandemic gets out of hand. Have at least 200’ for all your needs.
Tyvek Disposable Coveralls offer great body protection.
Both Crystalline Vitamin C and cone flower (echinacea) will give you an option to boost the immune system. These two are critical in assuring your ability to stave off the disease as well as fight it off once its attacking you.
Water Storage will be crucial and you will want to have at least 1.5 gallons per person per day. This water will play a massive role in the hydration of those who become sick.
Hydration Powder will add a little oomph to your water through things like electrolytes. You may not have an IV on hand but that doesn’t mean you cannot stay hydrated properly.
Hardback copy of serious medical volumes like The Survival Medicine Handbook, The Doomsday Book of Medicine.
There are items that you can include for protection outside the home on a daily basis. These items would not be part of your EDC or every day carry but would be better suited in something like a get home bag.
You will also want some basic meds stored at in your car as well. These meds should be for dealing with symptoms. Meds that will fight fever, diarrhea and something for sore throat would all be great options. A non-drowsy medication for congestion would also help.
A basic trauma kit will also be vital. Remember that pathogens can enter your body through any damage in your skin or any orifice. If you are cut during a pandemic it will be crucial that you clean and cover that cut ASAP.
Ideally, these items get you home as quickly as possible where you can survive a little more safely without the germs of the outside world.
Unfortunately, even while people may be suffering from disease inside your home, you will still have others who want to get into your home to get what they need. This is particularly true for areas that are densely populated. They will be looking for meds, food and water. They will likely have people who are sick in their own lives. It’s a terrible thing to think about.
Still, if your family is safe within your home the last thing you want is someone from the outside tracking germs inside. You must stay vigilant and try to stop threats at the doors or windows of your home. Being proactive in this method could save those in your home.
The Attack Drone is a dual-purpose technology that acts as eyes outside the home as well as a deterrent for those who want to come on to your property. This battery powered quadcopter will not fly for very long but you will only need to give chase once. Outfit your drone with some lightweight sharpened metals or even something that looks like a taser. This is an intimidation method more than anything else.
A Perimeter Alarm will help you understand when someone has ventured too close. This will allow you some lead time so the threat does not come barreling through the front door or bashing through a window. Be sure the alarm runs off simple batteries and have a plan to change them after a while.
Any threat must be dealt with as quickly as possible. You do not want an infected person touching you or getting into your home. This is not time for a wrestling match. Be sure you have an effective firearm that will stop someone, even in light body armor, from getting into your home.
Basic preps will still be necessary in conjunction with these preps, which are more specific to the pandemic. Always start with a great base that you can build on.
Yes, I was thinking the same. Would chlorine work??
Yea sure, I will get on this list right away.
the action or process of disputing or arguing.
mid 16th century (in the sense ‘solemn appeal or protest’): from Latin contestatio(n-), from contestari ‘call upon to witness’ (see contest); reinforced by French contestation .
I think what was meant was congestion medication.
That’s exactly why word usage, punctuation and spelling are actually critical. Unfortunately, in the U.S., some folks for whatever reason decry correct grammar and castigate those who suggest that the incorrect word, incorrect spelling etc make understanding the text difficult.
Constipation never occurred to me. But you are correct, it could be constipation. While constipation and congestion are both blockages of the body’s passages, they certainly are at vastly different parts of the body and take significantly different medications. Not bad to have remedies for both conditions, so we could add another to the list because both will make you miserable. Reminds me of a joke about a cat and castor oil but we have a mixed audience on this list and so I won’t post it here.
I do have one that I can post here. Nurse goes into the patient’s room and find a suppository stuffed in his right nostril. She goes to the student nurse and asks why the suppository is in the patient’s nostril. The student nurse said “The prescription said, ‘PRN’. Doesn’t that mean “Place in right nostril”?
For those who don’t know the medical abbreviations, “PRN” means “As needed.” If you don’t know the abbreviation, of course, the joke makes no sense at all.
In case you are a late-comer to this article, number 10 originally was “contestation meds.” I see that it has been edited to what I guessed was meant. Green guessed it applied to the other end of the body. Both medications are important in an EOTW situation, but as noted, have significantly different applications.
Okay, after looking up each item on the interne, typing in almost verbatim of each said item, and coming with the realization that some items are repeated(but I went with the full list anyway), I came to a total of 2400.00 dollars. And I’m sure quantities vary from family to family, but I am incorporating a family of six. Tried to be frugal and practical on smaller things, but others I went a little on the high end because we are talking about safety and survival.
Not a waste of time, I enjoy math Joan. I understand it is a slow process to acquire necessary preps. I just need about a hundred fifty thousand dollars to cover most things. You know, bug out house, bug out vehicle, solar generator, year supply of food…..
Amazon has just about everything.
U-line.com; Grainger.com; Farmtek.com; there are many farm and industrial supply companies on line and they all carry these items, in addition, of course, Amazon.
Thanks for the article. We have lucked out that there has not already been another pandemic. We came breathtakingly close with the SARS epidemic of 2003. I HIGHLY recommend you get your hands on a small book, SARS in China, published by Stanford University Press in 2006. It vividly recounts chapter and verse of how SARS spread, and is shocking in depicting how close we came — and nearly went. We may actually owe our lives to the totalitarian regime in China at the time. Hard to swallow, but there it was.
Check out the mortality rates for the three forms of plague. You won’t believe me.
At the very least, stock up on N-95 masks. Pneumonia is no joke. I caught an ordinary strain of infectious pneumonia that was going around here in the mid-Atlantic to East coast states a couple of years ago, was unable to eat, barely able to drink water, and lost 20 pounds I didn’t have to lose. Could not have antibiotics. My paramedic/acupuncturist daughter pulled me out of the flames, much to everybody’s amazement, and I don’t recommend the disease. You may not have access to antibiotics or other medical care in a pandemic. Especially living away from others. The plus and the minus.
For a gripping read about how the Second Pandemic of yersinia pestis, plague, “Black Death,” mutated and spread, check out John Kelly’s excellent The Great Mortality. I am reading it for the 4th time, still broadening my perspective. [I don’t normally read anything twice.] It will knock you off your chair.
Btw, sitting on an airplane within 12 – 16 rows of someone with an airborne infection gives you a great opportunity to catch whatever they have. There’s a reason all those Japanese travelers wear masks. So who cares if you look strange on the airplane?
Lucy: I found that book very interesting. There is another book on the Great Plagues whose title I cannot recall at this moment, but John Kelly’s book was superior in my view. I just started to re-read it too.
The Japanese wear those masks not only to avoid getting some sickness, but if they are feeling under the weather they wear them to avoid giving what they have to others. Not just travelers wear them. If you go to Japan you will see people wearing them everywhere, especially during the flu season. It started because the trains are so crowded during rush hour people are really packed in like sardines. There are official pushers on the platform whose job it is to make sure everyone is packed into the train so the doors can close. They are on all the platforms during rush hours in Tokyo and other major cities. And they all wear masks. So the guy with the mask and the white gloves who is pushing you into the train isn’t trying to mug you. He is performing his job which is to make sure everyone is safely packed into the car with no body parts sticking out. He signals the conductor when everyone is packed in so the doors can close. The trains run on such tight schedules that no time can be wasted on some dawdler not getting fully into the car. Unlike the U.S. where the conductor sometimes can’t even tell you what day you will reach the next station, the Japanese train conductor can tell you to the second what time the train will stop in the next station and to the second what time it will start pulling out. The Japanese train will also stop at a precise location so as you are standing on the platform you can be standing at the exact spot where the doors will be located when the train stops. That’s so you don’t waste time having to move to the door location. A little off topic, but hopefully interesting.
I’m curious about the attack drone. Is there a specialized attack drone that already exist?
Yeah, it’s called the Predator, but I don’t know if you can afford it. Besides, the U.S. only sells them to foreign governments. They don’t sell them to U.S. citizens.
If you read all the text, it is just any battery operated drone gussied up to look like it has a weapon on it. I suppose if one were skilled enough, one could devise a solenoid mechanism that would fire a single round or perhaps turn on its side and spill out a caustic solution from a container.
It could also be rigged to drop an explosive device on somebody. Civilian drones can carry a payload, but the bigger the payload, the bigger the drone. The bigger the drone, the more bucks it takes to acquire one and the more skill it requires to operate it. Just a drone flying around with a video camera on it turned on before launch and turned off when it runs out of battery power or gets back to you is simple enough and could provide useful information. However, there are so many other things that are more important. Like food and water. Medicine. Shelter. all of those are more important to most of us than a drone. Of course, if you have an unlimited budget, there are all sorts of toys that would be fun to have. An armored up four wheel drive truck with puncture proof tires and firing ports would be a fun toy. A surplus MRAP would be a nifty toy and handy to have for the apocalypse. A police department is going to action off its supply of Thompson submachine guns this year or early next year. They are probably each going to go for over $100K. Fun to have in an apocalypse. I’ll have to pass. My Thompson fund is not quite up to $100K yet. In addition here in the PDRK we can’t have anything that looks that dangerous. It scares our masters.
One item I didn’t see on the list was colloidal silver. I wouldn’t want to face a pandemic or anything else without it.
You have to consume LARGE quantities of colloidal silver to turn blue. Those people you’ve heard about turning blue usually drank a pint or more a day and it was typically poorly homemade with silver alloyed with other metals, like silver dimes or quarters. You also need very pure water to properly make it. Just putting some on your skin or consuming a teaspoon or less (which is all you need to consume per day) will not turn you blue.
We make our own using .9999 silver wire, the purest available. We have used colloidal silver, both commercially-made and homemade, for many years for various things. In a lot of those cases, “modern medicine” only made the problems worse. Our doctors even approves of colloidal silver. Their nurses even use it.
Believe what you want to about colloidal silver. It sounds like you only believe the bad information you’ve read and that you’ve never tried it yourself. That’s your prerogative.
As for me and mine, we know the benefits of it and will continue to use it – AND WE WON’T TURN BLUE!!!
I would also strongly recommend a supplement called Super Oxide Dismutase (SOD for short) As I understand it, this is an enzyme that your body makes from all that Vitamin C we take when we are sick… it is readily available on Amazon. I have noticed a marked improvement in my health since I started taking it. It is cheap at something $10/bottle. I mentioned it to my doctor and when he checked it out he was very excited about it. I have heard referred to as a super anti-oxidant.
Item rarely mentioned – pump up garden sprayers for the large job of disinfecting and the quart bottle size hand sprayers for wiping down the interior areas ….
People need to understand, in a pandemic, depending on what it is and how it has mutated, you are probably going to die. There are already infections that are immune to antibiotics. Best way in my opinion to deal with a pandemic, is to quarantine those infected and around them, kill them or let them die off, burn the whole area to sanitize it. Wash and repeat. It isnt pretty or wholesome, but I’m pragmatic, not emotional.
Unfortunately burning the number of bodies involved in a pandemic won’t be that eazy – it’ll be more like dragging off the body and stockpiling in a vacant house – fire the entire house and feed it until it’s all ashes ….
What about good old fashioned Arm and Hammer Baking Soda. I read somewhere on the internet that people who used it during the Spanish Flu pandemic didn’t die as much as the people who didn’t use it.
Used it for what purpose? Ate it? Washed surfaces with it? Washed clothes with it? Added it to their cooking? All of the aforementioned are uses that I know of for baking soda. I don’t think any one of them would have an effect on the influenza virus. Please spell out how they used baking soda to defeat the influenza virus in 1917.
Perhaps this is one of the many urban legends floating around the internet. I don’t know. I would certainly like to know how it was used, if it actually had some kind of antiviral effect. Keep in mind that influence is a virus and not a bacterium. Many people don’t distinguish between the two, but antibiotics only work on bacteria. They have absolutely no effect on viruses. Substances that are antibacterial may or may not have any effect on viruses. Washing your hands removes both bacteria and viruses by virtue of the soap making the surface of your hand slippery and the water washes them away. It doesn’t necessarily kill them. It is a mechanical process, not a chemical one. Washing one’s hands with baking soda would have no more effect than washing with Fels Naptha Soap or Ivory Soap.
Maybe the simple act of washing their hands was the key. Back then, people didn’t wash like they do today. Even doctors seldom washed their hands between patients. The “scientific community”, if you want to call them that, was just beginning to learn about the connection of bacteria/viruses to diseases and the idea still wasn’t widely accepted.
For a pandemic such as Bird Flu, you do not want Echinacea, or anything else that will boost the immune system.
Also part of my collection; “A Modern Herbal – Volumes 1& 2” by Ms. M. Grieve (it hasn’t gone out of print since first published (!) by my possibly incorrect reckoning!). You WILL NEED TO DOWNLOAD/PRINT an “Apothecaries List of Measures”” to get the best use out of these books. Given the time that they were written (early 1930″s, WAY prior to Big Pharma!), these were the people you went to if you couldn’t make it yourself!!
Another set of books I’d recommend are by Juliette de Bairacli Levy. She wrote several… cats, dogs, farm animals, humans… also considered “out-dated”. (I found mine on Amazon, and will get more if possible! Look them over, get what you want/need!) But By-Golly-Gawd if those tomes were ALL I had, I’d USE them!!!
I’d also recommend Dr. Richard Pitcairn “Natural Health For Dogs and Cats” (homeopathic/nutrition-based) it’s his latest and possibly last (4th) edition… The List isn’t endless, but looks like it.
Work with your people.. spread the “knowledge acquisition” amongst all the interested parties! You could create a helluva library!!! On ALL sorts of subjects! Just hope someone can use this info, or is maybe inspired to use it!!