34 Post-Disaster Health Musts To Fight Disease!

Disaster has struck and everything you planned for at its worst, unfortunately, is unfolding right before your eyes. You think you’re ready. You’re armed, educated, in your shelter or bunker and your survival instincts have switched from the first 24 hours to the rest of your life. The question you have to ask yourself now is do you know how to defend yourself or your family from the unseen enemy because when SHTF, nature’s diseases tend to feast on the sick, the foolish and the unprepared.

RELATED: Invisible Killers: Ebola and Other Deadly Diseases

Good hygiene isn’t the only thing you’ll need to do to survive. Here are some guidelines for you to consider as you practice and prepare for surviving a really bad day. Let’s break down what to do and why you should do it based on possible sources of illnesses.

Animal & Insect Attacks

When all hell breaks loose, so do people’s pets. Dogs, cats and every other critter once under control may very well roam free where you are. Since they’re trying to survive just as much as you are, they may be an active threat all by themselves. Stopping a known threat is pretty academic if you were smart enough to put survival weapons in your shelter. Rifles, shotguns, handguns and even archery equipment can do that job if you’re up to the marksmanship challenge and remembered to stockpile ammunition. Besides unavoidable encounters, the CDC says to avoid animals after a disaster, along with any sort of biting or stinging insect. Good advice, but certainly not breaking news. So how do you do that? Keeping critters away, which might not have your same level of dedication to keeping clean and healthy, is paramount. The CDC recommends keeping food sources secure to minimize attracting animals of all kinds, including rats and other animals that serve as hosts for disease-carrying pests.

” … if the water is contaminated, then you have to pick your poison … Do you die from dehydration or do you take your chances with questionable water?”

Minimizing your exposure to dreaded insects like mosquitoes also plays a significant role in reducing your exposure to malaria, West Nile Virus and dengue fever. Officials at the CDC said, “To protect yourself from mosquitoes, use screens on dwellings; wear long pants, socks, and long-sleeved shirts; and use insect repellents that contain DEET or Picaridin. Follow directions on the product label and take care when using DEET on small children.” Some of the things you can do to help reduce the mosquito population are to remove standing water in and around your shelter. Places like abandoned tires, flower pots, pools and flooded areas all serve as standing-water mosquito breeding grounds and should be eliminated whenever possible.

Still, something horrific has happened for you to be in disaster-survival mode and chances are there are going to be animal carcasses around. If you decide to leave your shelter, or worse, if the dead animals are in your shelter already, what are the best ways to get rid of them? The CDC says wearing personal protective equipment like gloves are key, and to dispose of the remains via plastic bags. The CDC also says to call authorities to come get the carcasses, but for our situation, the emergency services, police, and other first responders have all collapsed. Dead bodies, animal or human, are a problem, but they’re not the biggest problem facing survivors with regard to the spread of disease if a natural disaster like a flood or superstorm is the cause of the deaths. According to The Communicable Diseases Working Group on Emergencies at the World Health Organization (WHO), “The risk of (disease) outbreaks are associated with the size, health status and living conditions of the population displaced by the natural disaster. Crowding, inadequate water and sanitation, and poor access to health services, often characteristic of sudden population displacement, increase the risk of communicable disease transmission.”

Water Dangers

So what is the most important thing survivors should worry about when it comes to staying healthy after a disaster? The WHO again serves as our expert source by saying, “Ensuring uninterrupted provision of safe drinking water is the most important preventive measure to be implemented following a natural disaster.” Why? The reason is the need for water is irrefutable, and if the water is contaminated, then you have to pick your poison, so to speak. Do you die from dehydration or do you take your chances with questionable water? Here are just a few of the most likely water-borne illnesses you might encounter in a disaster situation: diarrhea, cholera, hepatitis A and hepatitis E, and many more. According to WHO documents, an outbreak of diarrhea reached more than 17,000 cases following a flood in Bangladesh in 2004. Terrific.

How do we clean our water if it’s contaminated? The experts at the WHO said, “Chlorine is widely available, inexpensive, easily used and effective against nearly all waterborne pathogens.” Still, the takeaway here is to plan for a clean source of water.

Infectious Crowds

During a disaster, however, bad water isn’t your only pitfall for encountering a deadly disease. Being around crowds of people who are displaced is bad news for your immune system as well. Here are a few diseases, according to the WHO, you can expect if you find yourself amongst quite a few friends who share in your horrible day. Measles can spread like wildfire, especially if immunizations in the region afflicted have gone lax or are even non-existent. Another game-changing illness is meningitis. Acute respiratory infections (ARIs) will rear their ugly head as well because they feast on disaster recovery’s inherently high-risk factors.

Wound Care

Rusty nails, dog bites, cuts and other injuries can make you susceptible to tetanus. According to the WHO, “Tetanus is not transmitted from person to person, but is caused by a toxin released by the anaerobic tetanus bacillus Clostridium tetani. Contaminated wounds, particularly in populations where routine vaccination coverage levels are low, are associated with morbidity and mortality from tetanus.” How do you take care of wounds? In best-case scenarios, you can seek professional medical attention, but that may not always be available.

Blackout Safety

When the power goes out, whether it’s in your house, on your street or throughout your entire county, there are things you need to be aware of to help fend off life-threating diseases or illnesses after a disaster. With the power out, going to your generator makes sense. If and when you do, be sure to ventilate it so that carbon monoxide doesn’t claim your family before you’ve had a chance to open your bug-out bag. The CDC said if the power is out longer than two hours, throw away food that has a temperature higher than 40 degrees, and of course, try to verify that your drinking water is safe to drink.

Remember, if the power goes out it means the power may go out at sewage treatment plants, or other municipal utility services, so even if you are getting your water from the tap after a disaster, verify that it’s clean and safe through proper authorities or your own water quality testing. If the weather’s particularly hot, try to stay cool to avoid heat illnesses.

Prepping For Health

Years of prepping for the apocalypse can be wasted if you don’t respect nature and the dangers you can’t see. You must prepare for diseases, as they can wipe out a lot more than just the elderly. There’s no need to go back to medieval times to see Mother Nature wipe out armies who didn’t practice good hygiene.

According to an article in the 1995 May-June U.S. Army Medical Department Journal regarding the impact disease and illness had on the Soviet Army during its Afghanistan campaign, nearly 70 percent of their in-country military was hospitalized due to some form of illness. “These illnesses included 115,308 cases of infectious hepatitis and 31,080 cases of typhoid fever. The remaining 233,554 cases were split between plague, malaria, cholera, diphtheria, meningitis, heart disease, shigellosis (infectious dysentery), amoebic dysentery, rheumatism, heat stroke, pneumonia, typhus, and paratyphus.”

So, wash your hands. Keep yourself, your food and your shelter clean and ensure everyone you care about practices your same healthy habits. After all, if you think the wait in the doctor’s office is long or expensive now just wait until the end of the world.

AVOIDING DISEASE AFTER DISASTER

• Clean up, disinfect and practice good hygiene to avoid illness from bacteria, viruses, mold, and mildew.

• Get medical care if you are injured, sick or having trouble coping with stress.

• To prevent carbon-monoxide poisoning, only use generators, pressure washers, grills, camp stoves or other gasoline-, propane-, natural gas- or charcoal-burning devices outside and away from open windows, doors and air vents.

• Stay cool and drink plenty of fluids to prevent heat-related illness.

WOUND CARE 101

• Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and clean water if possible.

• Avoid touching the wound with your fingers while treating it (if possible, use disposable latex gloves).

• Remove obstructive jewelry and clothing from the injured body part.

• Apply direct pressure to any bleeding wound to control bleeding.

• Clean the wound after the bleeding has stopped.

• Examine the wounds carefully for dirt and foreign objects.

• Gently flood the wound with bottled water or clean running water (if available, saline solution is preferred).

• Gently clean the wound with soap and clean water.

• Pat dry and apply an adhesive bandage or dry clean cloth.

• Leave unclean wounds, bites, and punctures open. Wounds that are not cleaned correctly can trap bacteria and result in infection.

• Provide pain relievers when possible.

Used with permission from RealWorldSurvivor Website.

A Massive Electromagnetic Pulse Could Collapse The Economy In A Single Moment

What would you do if all the lights went out and they never came back on?

That is a question that the NBC series “Revolution” asks… but most people have no idea that a similar thing could happen in real life at any moment. A single gigantic electromagnetic pulse over the central United States could potentially fry most of the electronics from coast to coast if it was powerful enough. This could occur in a couple of different ways. 

If a powerful nuclear weapon was exploded at a high enough altitude, it could produce an electromagnetic pulse powerful enough to knock out electronics all over the country. Alternatively, a massive solar storm could potentially cause a similar phenomenon to happen just about anywhere on the planet without much warning. Of course, not all EMP events are created equal. An electromagnetic pulse can range from a minor inconvenience to a civilization-killing event.

It just depends on how powerful it is. But in the worst case scenario, we could be facing a situation where our electrical grids have been fried, there is no heat for our homes, our computers don’t work, the Internet does not work, our cell phones do not work, there are no more banking records, nobody can use credit cards anymore, hospitals are unable to function, nobody can pump gas, and supermarkets cannot operate because there is no power and no refrigeration. Basically, we would witness the complete and total collapse of the economy. According to a government commission that looked into these things, approximately two-thirds of the U.S. population would die from starvation, disease and societal chaos within one year of a massive EMP attack. It would be a disaster, unlike anything we have ever seen before in U.S. history.

Most people are completely unaware regarding what an EMP attack could do to this nation, but the threat is very real. There was even a congressional commission that studied the potential effects of an EMP attack on the United States for eight years…

The US Congress in 2000 established the Congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. In 2004, the committee produced a 70-page executive summary on the EMP threat, and it issued a final report on the matter in 2008. According to the report, “several potential adversaries have or can acquire the capability to attack the United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapon-generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP). A determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of sophistication.”

Dr. William Graham was the chairman of that commission, and he says that an EMP attack could knock the United States back into the 1800s in just a single moment…

An EMP attack “could not only take down power grids, which are fragile anyway in this country, and telecommunications networks, and financial networks, and traffic controls and many other things, but in addition, there is a very close interrelationship among those national infrastructure capabilities,” Graham says.

“So, for example, we need telecommunications to re-establish the power network, and we need the power network to keep telecommunications going for more than a few hours. And we need the financial network to continue to operate to maintain the economy, we need the transportation system, roads, street lights, control systems, to operate just to get people to the failed power, telecommunication, and other systems,” he adds.

Life after an EMP attack “would probably be something that you might imagine life to be like around the late 1800s but with several times the population we had in those days, and without the ability of the country to support and sustain all those people,” Graham says. “They wouldn’t have power. Food supplies would be greatly taken out by the lack of transportation, telecommunication, power for refrigeration and so on.”

Unfortunately, very few of us are equipped to survive in such an environment. We have become incredibly dependent on technology, and most Americans would have no idea how to do something as simple as growing their own food. Most people would be in a very serious amount of trouble in a very short period of time.

An article by Mac Slavo detailed some of the things that we could expect in the aftermath of a massive electromagnetic pulse…

The first 24 – 48 hours after such an occurrence will lead to confusion among the general population as traditional news acquisition sources like television, radio and cell phone networks will be non-functional.

Within a matter of days, once people realize the power might not be coming back on and grocery store shelves start emptying, the entire system will begin to delve into chaos.

Within 30 days a mass die off will have begun as food supplies dwindle, looters and gangs turn to violent extremes, medicine can’t be restocked and water pump stations fail.

Are you prepared for such an event?

If not, why not?

And actually, high altitude nuclear explosions and solar storms are not the only things that could produce sizable EMP bursts.

For example, the U.S. military has developed “a directed electromagnetic pulse gun” that can take out all electronics within a limited area. This kind of weapon can be fired from a plane, a cruise missile or even a drone. The following is from a recent WND article…

A pre-programmed cruise missile not too different from a drone has been proven to be capable of blasting out an EMP-type microwave that was able to destroy personal computers and electrical systems inside a building over which it was flying.

The U.S. Air Force and its contractor Boeing have created the High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP, which was just tested over a Utah desert.

Other nations such as Russia and China are busy developing similar weapons. The ability to instantly take out the electronics of the enemy would be a very powerful advantage.

Even North Korea has been working on this kind of technology. According to Newsmax, it is believed that they may have tested a “Super-EMP” weapon back in 2009…

North Korea’s last round of tests, conducted in May 2009, appear to have included a “super-EMP” weapon, capable of emitting enough gamma rays to disable the electric power grid across most of the lower 48 states

As this technology becomes more widespread, it will soon be accessible to just about everyone. You don’t actually need a nuclear weapon to set off a massive electromagnetic pulse. A non-nuclear pulse generator can do the same thing. If you set one off next to a power station you could potentially take out the electrical grid for an entire region.

It’s been theorized that enemies could even use portable radio frequency weapons to do a tremendous amount of electromagnetic damage over a more limited area. The following is from a recent article by F. Michael Maloof…

Such an individual with a penchant for electronics can pull together components from a Radio Shack or electronic store – even order the components off of selected Internet websites – and fashion a radio frequency, or RF, weapon.

As microprocessors become smaller but more sophisticated, they are even more susceptible to an RF pulse. The high power microwave from an RF weapon produces a short, very high power pulse, said to be billions of watts in a nanosecond or billionths of a second.

This so-called burst of electromagnetic waves in the gigahertz microwave frequency band can melt electrical circuitry and damage integrated circuits, causing them to fail.

What’s most alarming is that constructing a radio frequency weapon is, on the relative scale of things, not that difficult.

People need to realize that we live in a world where technology is absolutely exploding and we are dealing with threats that previous generations never even dreamed of. As the world becomes increasingly unstable, it is inevitable that these kinds of weapons will be used.

It is only a matter of time.

What will life look like after an EMP weapon is used?

That is something to think about.

And we also need to keep watching the sun. It could produce a massive electromagnetic pulse at literally any moment. As I have written about previously, scientists tell us that it is only a matter of time before we are hit with a technology-crippling solar super storm.

Most people don’t even realize that the massive solar storm of 1859 fried telegraph machines all over Europe and North America. If such a storm hit us today, the damage would potentially be in the trillions of dollars. The following is from a recent New York Times article…

A powerful solar (or “geomagnetic”) storm has the potential to simultaneously damage multiple transformers in the electricity grid and perhaps even bring down large sections of it, affecting upwards of a hundred million people in the United States for many months, if not years.

These huge transformers are expensive and difficult to replace, and not many are stockpiled in the United States for an emergency. In the worst case, the impact would be devastating: An outage could cost a few trillion dollars, with full recovery taking years. Not only would parts of the grid be compromised, but telephone networks, undersea cables, satellites, and railroads also would be affected.

A 2008 National Academy of Sciences study warned that “because of the interconnectedness of critical infrastructures in modern society,” the “collateral effects of a longer-term outage” would likely include “disruption of the transportation, communication, banking and finance systems, and government services; the breakdown of the distribution of potable water owing to pump failure; and the loss of perishable foods and medications because of lack of refrigeration.”

By the way, 2013 is the peak of the current solar cycle. So we are moving into a time period when conditions will be very favorable for solar storms.

Let us hope that we are never hit with a massive electromagnetic pulse that is strong enough to take out all of our electronics.

But if it did happen, and all the lights went out for good, what would you do?

Please feel free to share your thoughts by leaving a comment below…

By Michael Snyder – www.theeconomiccollapseblog.com

Edit – MFSP