Daily Digest 10/18 - The Arabian Game of Thrones Heats Up, Medical Care When The Lights Go Out

I thought that the ariticle posted today by a trauma surgeon /  prepper was very good and overlaps many of the things that I have been pondering.  I will repeat several main points and add my 2 cents.

His article is recommended!

1.  Trauma care will be minimal.  There is no operating room, anesthesiologist or surgical ICU waiting.  Prevention of injury becomes of paramount importance.  If you shatter your knee bones with an ax while chopping firewood, at best you can hope to be permanently disabled and walk with a brace and crutch for the rest of your life.

Wash wounds with clean water, soap (or a small dash of betadine in clean water).  Wash out visible dirt/gravel.  Put a clean cloth over the surface.  Lie down and rest.   Rinse wounds gently 2-3 times a day.  Apply direct pressure to control bleeding.  No tourniquets.

Don't travel or work alone. We will need team-mates to provide care when sick or injured.

2.  Avoid fecal-oral contamination.  The single greatest factor in the increased human longevity this century is the flush toilet that removes fecal material from our living environment.  A close second is the abundace of clean tap water lets us wash our hands before we eat, wash food and eating utensils.  Infectious diarrhea is a major killer in the 3rd world, much of which is spread when bacteria in feces get into our food and drinking water.

Think very carefully about where your latrine is placed.  Keep it well away from the garden, pond, or drinking water.  If someone can advise more about human-manuer composting, rather than simply burying the latrine, I would like to learn more about this.  A pit or trench latrine well removed from living and eating areas.  A bar of soap hanging from a rope ("soap on a rope") with a bucket of water for cleaning hands close to the latrine.

3.  Treatment of diarrhea.  Most diarrheal illnesses kill via dehydration and electrolyte disturbances, not by overwhelming infection.  Oral fluid replacement can be very helpful and turn most diarrheal illnesses around even if antibiotics are not available.  1 quart of clean water, 6 tsp sugar, 1/2 tsp of salt.  Then "drink until you pee."  (Potassium, magnesium, zinc and bicarb all play a role too.....)

4.  Home made shoes to prevent foot injuries.  Sandals can be made from old tires and a leather strip.  Pevention is the name of the game as a bad foot laceration or puncture that gets infected can be life-threatening.

Mike Maloney has a new video bringing attention to information in an article on Zerohedge, by Ronan Manly of Bullionstart.com, re the Hungarian Central Bank's accumulation of gold.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-18/khashoggi-murder-suspect-dies-suspicious-car-accident

A 31-year-old lieutenant in the Saudi Royal Air Force said to have participated in the killing of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi died in a "suspicious car accident" in Riyadh, according to Turkish media. 

Mashal Saad al-Bostani was reportedly on a 15-man hit squad dispatched to Saudi Arabia's Istanbul Consulate in Turkey on October 2 during Khashoggi's visit, before the team quickly left the country, according to daily Yeni Şafak. 

Albostani entered Turkey at 1:45 a.m. local time (2245GMT). He stayed at the Wyndham Grand Hotel and left the country at 9:46 p.m. local time (1846GMT) on a private jet which belonged to the Sky Prime Aviation company. -Yeni Şafak

Bostani's alleged role in the murder of the Saudi journalist are unclear, as are details of the traffic accident in Riyadh - prompting accusations of a cover up by those who orchestrated the Khashoggi hit. Meanwhile, a columnist for Turkey's Daily Hürriyetwrote on Thursday that Mohammad al Otaibi, Saudi Arabia's Istanbul consul-general, would be "the next execution."

Turkish daily Yeni Şafak reported Oct. 17 that Al-Otaibi’s voice could be heard in one of the recordings, which Turkish authorities are believed to have, of Khashoggi’s “interrogation” at the consulate.

According to the report, after Al-Otaibi told the interrogators to “do it somewhere else outside or I will be in trouble,” he was told to “shut up if you want to live when you are back in Saudi Arabia.”

Great info from the author of the article and you Sand Puppy.  I have made that home made hydration formula before and it does really do a good job.  Looking forward to the future articles in this series.

So, what would we want to do for house design? I imagine:

You want a latrine that actually destroys human waste. You probably want a holding tank followed by a rocket wood stove that completely dehydrates, then burns, and reburns the gas is one idea.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

Then for the house itself:

You need airflow, and you need cooling during the summer and heating during the winter. But there's more: humidity. And there's something else too: you need good food storage.

So my thought is a core house built in winding stair format around a wood stove at the bottom. The wood stove exhaust heats the air around the chimney, and the chimney radiates heat to the rooms. But instead of having the rooms right against the chimney, instead dehydration racks are right there, with doors to access them all the way up and down. But you open up the very bottom or the very top, to let the airflow through. In addition, you have to have your air intake through the ground below, but either delivered straight to the fire, or first to the house and from the house to the fire. That way, you control the temperature of the house.

When that is all done, you can bleed off some of the human waste to experiment with other zero-effluent designs that convert the nutrients to a more useful format.

I'm partial to a three-phase system involving solid processing (kudzu, fungal, worm, insect, bacterial) liquid (algae, water plants, duckweed, fish) gas (air plants). do that for a path of many processing, and you might get a good cycle.

Putting human waste in cattail beds or comfrey beds during the growing season is a good way to deal with human waste.  These plants comsume huge amounts of nutrients during the growing season it's best to only put them there during the growning season. Storing human waste in tubs with wood chips or other dry biomass during the off season and then placing them  in beds during the growing season is  a good way of protecting surface water.    Here in Ohio, many poultry farmers are placing large amounts  of poultry waste on the soil during the non growing season  and ends up in Lake Erie leading to toxic algae blooms.  Same thing happens to surface water from leach feilds, no grass or vegetation during the off season and it leaches into soil, not good. 

If latrines are well located, properly built and operated, they are often a much better solution than off-site sanitation (e.g. sewerage system) and definitely better then 'open solutions'. There is usually no issue with surface water if basic rules concerning placement, construction and maintenance are respected. Making an adeqauate latrine for household level is pretty straightforward in most rural conditions and easy to operate. I've seen pretty awful situations which exposed many to faecal waste just because 'it was a risk to (ground)water' (I worked in this domain for many years). Yes there can in specific circumstances be risks to ground- and surface water but these are often overblown.

A good latrine is a local treatment plant that deals with the issues at the place where they are generated (and as there are normally many latrines, the problem is diluted compared to centralised systems).

If fresh faecal waste is exposed to mammals or insects however, the risk of transmission is very real, and the more dense the population and the contact to animals/ insects, the larger the risk.

If you're interested in recovering nutrients from human waste, try to separate urine from faeces as urine contains much more nutrients and the risk of disease transmission is much lower.

"f fresh faecal waste is exposed to mammals or insects however, the risk of transmission is very real, and the more dense the population and the contact to animals/ insects, the larger the risk."

Realistically if your building a home odds are that the town or county will only grant you a building permit if you either use a sewer or sepic system (tank & drain field) I doubt they will permit you use an outhouse.

I don't think trying to recycle human waste is worth the effort, and you still need dispose of other forms or waste (ie laudry\floor cleaning agents). If you want to be self relient a standard septic system is the best option.

... is humidity control. Quite simply, mold can kill, and mold (as well as certain pestillential insects such as dust mites) depends on humidity being high-- so low humidity is needed. In a normal house design, that is accomplished with leaky, poor thermal construction.

If you don't want leaks, such as is required in a nuclear fallout shelter, you are going to have to accomplish the lower humidity in other ways. One way is to keep all running water out of the house... but you'd have to go outside then. So that's a problem.

Another way is active dehumidification, as airconditioners can provide --but that requires power, and is tech-intensive. If we go through a collapse, the tech might not work.

I'm not sure I have a good answer there, yet.

I think it's an area ripe for discussion.

The major medical scourges of developed western society are 1) obesity, 2) diabetes (type 2), 3) hypertension, and 4) atherosclerosis.   Arthritis deserves a (dis)honorable mention.  All of these are closely related to insulin resistance.

(This discussion does NOT include type 1 diabetes.  In type 1 diabetes, the pancreas is damaged and does not make insulin. Most commonly Type 1 begins in childhood.)   

With type 2, the pancreas is making insulin, but the biochemical receptor mechanisms in each cell have become insensitive to the insulin, requiring additional insulin to be given via shots, and the addition of medications to tweek the insulin receptor mechanisms into adequate function.

Intermittent fasting improves insulin sensitivity.  3 brief case report are available where intermittent fasting was used over about 10 months to improve insulin sensitivity.  In each case, patients needed less diabetes medicines and were able to discontinue most medicines.

The Hemoglobin A1c is used to measure an "average" blood sugar over the last 3 months.  In these 3 cases, HgA1c charts improved even as diabetes medications and insulin shots were taperd off gradually over several months.

Muscular activity clears glucose from the blood via a mechanism that is independent of insulin.  Exercise improves blood sugar control.  Even taking a brisk 15 minute walk after a meal improves glycemic control.  Julian Whitaker was well known advocate for behavioural treatments for T2DM.

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Thus there is some hope for insulin dependent Type 2 diabetics in a grid down situation. [Lots of work to be done, intermittent feeding, very few of the concentrated sugar sources that we love.]   Intermittent fasting, low sugar intake and exercise should improve these conditions.

Any of the Naturopaths want to add suggestions for herbal insulin sensitizers here?

One issue I see is that in a Grid down collapse, is that people will consume considerably more carbohydrates & starches. Which would make it more difficult to control blood sugar. I am not sure the diets will improve during a collapse, but likely to deterior as people eat whatever they can. Fresh fruits & vegetibles would be seasonable as no more imports from abroad. People are likely to eat more canned foods, that will either have a high acid, sugar or salt content.

I think in the big picture, of a long term collapse (>3 months) more than 90% of the population will die off: with disease & violence being the leading causes. I would imagine common water containmation diseases (Typhoid, Cholera, Legionellosis, etc) and dysentery will be leading causes of death. I would imagine most surface water sources would become highly contaminated as people start using streams, rivers, lakes, etc as makeshift toilets. Its likely that sewage treatment plants would fail and  leak or dump raw sewage into enviroment. I am not sure rainwater will be drinkable as I think in a collapse there will considerable air pollution as people set widespread fires (arson, makeshift stoves\heating systems that burn down there homes). I recall after 9/11 the trade center bullding continully had a smoke plumb for well over a month,even with firefighters pouring water constantely. I would image that without water or firefighters, entire cities will burn and continue to burn for long periods. Thus Rainwater collection is probably not going to be an option. My recommendation is to have a potable underground water source, preferrable deep so any surface contamination does not quickly contaminate it.

I recall that during the 2005 crisis in New Orleans, the football stadium (used as shelter) had to be evacuated after about 4 or 5 days because possiblity of waterborne diseases (bathrooms became clogged and the water was contaminated). In the case of New Orleans, residents had access to clean drinking water as gov't & business brought in trucks filled with water and bottle watered. In a full collapse there aren't likely to be water delivery trucks. Thus diabetes will be of no significant consequence when even most of the healthest people die off.

FWIW: I believe it would be possible to synthesize insulin locally. IIRC insulin is produced using a gene modified yeast to produce human insulin. If you are able to obtain your own culture of this, you could produce your own. Prior to this, insulin was collected from mammals. I suppose one could learn how to use the old process, but I believe insulin from other mammals isn't exactly the same as human insulin which can cause problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin