Finished The Last Policeman and Countdown City.

[conuly]

Of course, we have to wait until mid-July for the third book to find out if the protagonist survives the impending asteroid.

A good book makes you think, and this one made me think about disaster preparedness. We aren't really financially in a position to stockpile enough food and other supplies to get through an impact winter right now (and ideally we would probably want to be off the coast and away from the city, but then, so would everybody else), but I was just idly thinking it out. One thing that is made clear in the books is that most people would be better prepared for the coming disaster if they and others hadn't left their jobs beforehand. By three months before the event food supplies are low, phones are basically gone, and huge swaths of the country have no power. There would be way more food stored for the after-the-end period if the farmers and distributors and whatnot had just stayed on the job instead of going "bucket list" or killing themselves, and it would last a lot longer if the electricity was reliable.

But anyway, I was idly thinking this out, and counting up the various people I would want to form a stay-alive-after-the-end! community with me, and calculating how many other people I'd end up inviting (would definitely want at least one doctor, plus some people with boy children so we might have a chance of long term survival there, and, oh yeah, people who know what the heck they're doing!) and I remembered that one of my IRL friends has a daughter with diabetes. And of course she's on the list, they're the only people I know who speak Turkish.

Well, shoot, what *do* diabetic survivalists plan to do? Insulin doesn't store that well, does it?

Gosh, I love google. Apparently, not only is it possible in an emergency situation to make your own insulin, but people have done it to save lives during WWII! As noted in the forum I got that info from there are some serious risks of reactions using insulin from the pancreas of various animals, not to mention the little fact that you might be short on beef after the end, but modern methods of insulin production (involving bacteria?) might actually manage to be more scalable to the home situation, though you wouldn't want to try it yourself unless you literally had no choice. (And I want to reiterate that one. If it isn't a life or death situation where the alternative is no insulin, please, let's leave medicine making to the professionals.)

Comments

[siderea]

Well, shoot, what *do* diabetic survivalists plan to do?

"Die," apparently. I have never heard of a diabetic survivalist, but I sure have heard a lot of diabetics respond to survivalists asking, "What are you going to do if civilization ends?!" with, "Die. I won't survive the end of modern medicine."

you wouldn't want to try it yourself unless you literally had no choice. (And I want to reiterate that one. If it isn't a life or death situation where the alternative is no insulin, please, let's leave medicine making to the professionals.)

Well, no. If you want to be able to manufacture insulin in an emergency, your best shot at success is practicing making insulin now. Consider that the woman in that link took a year of experimenting on rabbits to come up with that homemade batch of insulin.

Also, note that she pulled this off by having a copy of Beckman's Internal Medicine, something that will probably be vastly easier to source while ABEBooks is still functioning. Note that book doesn't seem to exist, so you might want to find some other set of instructions. Likewise, you'll want to make a shopping list of the necessary durable lab goods. Erlenmeyer flasks don't grow on trees.

ETA: Screw this "Beckman" person. Insulin and its application for diabetics was discovered by a guy named Banting and another guy named Best. I think you're looking for Banting, F.G., Best, C.H. (1923) The Discovery and Preparation of Insulin, U. of Toronto Medical Journal I (1923): 94-98.

ETA2: The bibliography of The Discovery of Insulin is a trove of cites to the original research.

[conuly]

True. If you think we are approaching the end of civilization (or at least that it is a possibility) you want to be prepared before it happens. But do your testing on the cuddly little bunnies, not on yourself, is all I mean.

I really am impressed at the fact that she was able to keep several people alive this way during the war. Given that they were all fleeing the Holocaust, that's right up there with hiding folks in your attic. But with somewhat less risk of ending up dead. Well, unless it hadn't worked, in which case she would've been dead anyway, but... I shouldn't type when I'm tired. Point is, she's a hard-working hero who made the best of a bad, bad situation. For her, the Japanese occupation must have been like jumping out of the frying pan and into another, different frying pan.

[conuly]

Also, if I want to manufacture insulin in an emergency situation, I think I want to look into modern methods. Yeast seems like once it gets started it has got to be easier to source than beef. I mean, bread starters can last for generations, but once you rip the pancreas out of a bull... not so much.

[siderea]

Funny you should mention. At the convention this weekend, I went to a panel about the medical considerations of the planned Martian colony. One of which is that they're gonna have to grow all their own drugs, because shipping them something from Earth is not at all a timely way of getting a livesaving supply. So the plan (okay, somebody's plan -- I came in late and am unsure which Martian colonization plan we were discussing) involved using synthesizing all their own drugs. (This for a colony of 12 pp.) Some handwaving was involved.

I gather the notion is lots of little bacteriological farms churning out whatever modern medicines they need.

(Personally, I think they haven't really thought this through all the way, and said as much.)

[conuly]

Well, apparently we really do make insulin that way today. NO idea how (I'm not planning, I'm just thinking things over sans plan), but it does make sense that any space colony would have to make its own medicines eventually. Might be a little cost prohibitive for just 12 people, though.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

If it's a life or death situation where the alternative is no insulin, it's WAY too late to try making the stuff yourself for the very first time. Anybody who's going to learn to make it that way had better get good at making it before civilization collapses and they literally have no choice but to inject themselves with whatever they've managed to come up with.

What I figure: in the event of a disaster, my stay-alive community is my whole community - my neighborhood, my town, my peninsula, my region - so I would ally myself with whatever remained of the pre-existing social services.

It always astonishes me, in movies such as Red Dawn, that it never occurs to any of those veterans to report for duty before haring off on their own. Haha, and you wouldn't believe how many 'survivalists' think they'd escape the fall of civilization by running away to the Olympic mountains. There's no food up there! Duh, that's why the Native people all lived down by the sea. What there is up there is a lot of weather and gravity, plus crazy people with guns who already live there and wouldn't be pleased to have neighbors.

[conuly]

Ugh, LJ ate my comment. Let me try this again.

1. siderea said the same thing. Seriously, you should check out her journal one day, and vice versa. You're often on the same wavelength.

While I do of course agree that if you are seriously preparing for the end of the world you should know how to make your urgent medicine in advance, you should do your testing on cute fluffy bunnies, not yourself. I just don't want some fool (not one of my friends, I don't think, but some stranger) getting this crazy idea to cut out the middleman. Your health and safety is nothing to fuck around with.

2. I don't like most of my neighbors all that much, not enough to be cooped up with them. I trust them, i just cant stand them. I'd rather stick to friends and family, and a few of my neighbors who would then be palatable due to the buffer zone.

3. Coasts are great*, but also heavily populated. I wouldn't want to go to the mountains, though, especially not when the Pacific Northwest has a rainforest. Mountains are rocky, and there's no fish or clams. Of course, all of NYC is rocky too, so I'd still want to move if I planned to be a farmer.

3a. Of course, my ideal after-the-end-but-things-are-looking-up career is lighthouse keeper. Simple, respectable, and nobody expects you to socialize with strangers. And it's useful!

* except in the case of global warming or asteroid impact or anything else that might cause the coastline to end up somewhere inside your house

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Thanks; I will pop over and say Hi to her!

The tragic truth is that in the event of a national emergency serious enough to disrupt pharmaceutical manufacture and distribution, the vast majority of people dependent for their lives on pharmaceutical medicines are going to die. The Type 1 diabetics don't have a prayer, because manufacturing enough insulin to keep even one of them alive is not really feasible at home when Civilization has not collapsed, and one can buy everything needed over the Internet. The people with high blood pressure would be dying like flies from heart attacks and strokes within a month of running out of medicine - and I might be one of them; I'm on the lowest possible dose, but I am on it. Everybody on 'maintenance' antibiotics, everybody on anti-viral treatment, everybody on statins, everybody dependent on an inhaler... that's a hell of a lot of people, and most of them would be goners, no saving throw.

*sighhh* Y'know, I've been thinking all this over since my early teens, when I had recurring, BluRay-vivid nightmares of leading a band of burned and dying children through the post-Apocalyptic ruins. Never in all my life have I believed that the 'American Way of Life' would out-last me, egregiouslyly unsustainable as it is, so I've been laying my plans to out-last it, and not by stupid, short-sighted 'survivalism' either. The fact is, the 'survivalists' are a primary threat to the rest of the populace, and if I were the CO of the local American armed forces, in the event of a collapse I would make it a priority to root (or if necessary blast) them all out of their fortified little bandit-holdings before they had time to become entrenched in them.

One of my daughter's former hopeless-contestant suitors was a young Marine who was just itching for Civilization to collapse so he can star in his own version of 'Red Dawn Meets I Am Legend'. (Not being much of a reader, apparently he missed Lucifer's Hammer, which might have wised him up a tiny bit.) This is a guy who never raised a single chicken in his life, let alone built the kind of chicken-fortress it takes to keep chickens in a varmint-rich ecosystem like ours. This is a guy who has never helped birth kittens, let alone sheep. This is a guy who barely knows where sugar comes from, and never heard that grain, hay and chaff all spontaneously combust if not stored 100% correctly.

Lee and I have shared gales of laughter over his absurd vision of himself as Master and Commander of a prosperous Heinleinian post-Apocalyptic community, but if the reality ever did come to pass, it wouldn't be so funny. Either he'd get a fucking clue and report for duty to whatever duly-constituted authority was left, or he'd end up a starving, desperate, dangerous marauder, and probably hurt a lot of innocent people before someone took him down - or the Wild killed him, which the Wild is extremely capable of doing without any help from humans.

Tell you what, it is HARD to make even a partially self-sustaining mini-farm from scratch in the Wild - even when one has a job that provides steady income, and a vehicle that can get up and down the mountain to the gas station, feed store and grocery store, and the ability to just buy tools, equipment, and building supplies, and a societal infrastructure that will not allow someone better-armed to just come in and take the place, or to plunder and burn it. It is damned hard and damned expensive, even if one knows what one is doing, which most of these brain-dead 'survivalists' certainly do not.
.

[conuly]

I don't know quite how unfeasible the insulin is, the linked-to woman managed to keep several people, including kids, alive for the war, using offal. I would not have believed it either. But I would need to do more research into the real-world feasibility of it.

Lucifer's Hammer? What's that?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Might be feasible for someone who had both the stuff and the know-how: back in WWII, butchering one's own meat was still common. But in this millenium, how many Americans have ever even seen offal, let alone considered that it might be useful? What we have in this country is the most helplessly-citified populace ever to walk the Earth; hundreds of thousands of people who couldn't cook a box of Mac'n'Cheese if the instructions weren't on the back of the box (with pictures), let alone identify the pancreas of a dead pig

Ah, good old Lucifer's Hammer (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218467.Lucifer_s_Hammer), the original big-comet-hits-Earth tale, before all those sucky movies. In all honesty, it sucks too - even back in the early 80's when I first read it, it sucked, because there's not a single character in it who's not a cardboard cut-out with a stereotype-label stuck on. It was a huge disappointment to me, because I was really into Larry Niven's Known Space stories (which utterly rock; if you've never read any, start with Ringworld (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61179.Ringworld?from_search=true)) - he doesn't exactly hide his odious neo-con personal politics in those, but at least he doesn't soapbox them the way he does in Lucifer's Hammer and other books set on Earth in the more-or-less modern era.

Therefore, I really can't recommend Lucifer's Hammer, despite that it's got some interesting ideas and was the first piece of fiction (that I know of) to deal with Life, Post-Comet in our own times. As far as actual survival skills go, it's painfully obvious that Larry Niven would not survive even a summer in the Wild alone without modern equipment, let alone a winter - not that winter in California is that big a deal, but he'd still die, because he has No Fucking Clue.

But Lucifer's Hammer isn't actually about surviving without modern amenities. It's really just a pretext for Ayn Rand-like, so-called 'Social Darwinist' wank, written for the Nerd Corps boys who know damn well that if the electricity ever goes off for good, they haven't got a single skill worth keeping them alive for. Not even manual labor or 'rough trade', because they're not very strong and not very attractive. In a lot of ways, Lucifer's Hammer reminds me of John Norman's Gor books, which appeal to a slightly different demographic of bitter white male losers who blame women and minorities for the fact that they're not the Masters of the World like they obviously should be.

Funny how it never occurs to those guys that the old white guys who ARE the Masters of the World have no intention of ever letting their tools and cannon-fodder share their power, any more than they'd invite dogs to sit at the dinner table - even their own most-trusted sheep-dogs and guard-dogs, let alone random strays, no matter how much they may wag their tails.

[conuly]

You might well be able to get it from the butcher or slaughterhouse, they'll still be around so long as people want to eat meat and meat is available. But since the 70s we've made insulin from yeast. If you can obtain the ingredients (that's the hard part here) and know what you're doing, that seems to me like it has got to be more scalable. But like I said, this is all idle speculation. The odds of asteroid impact anytime soon are slim.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

If the meat-packing industry is still operative, the pharmaceutical industry will be too. If the meat-packing industry is not operative, there isn't going to be any meat but what people raise themselves, and mostly that isn't going to be either pigs or cattle, because they're a lot of trouble. I found the recipe for insulin from ground-up pancreas - and if someone was going to follow that recipe, they'd need a lot more lab expertise than they got in Chem 101 - but how many pancreases would one person need? One can't just slaughter a sheep every week. The yeast method might be more do-able; I don't find a recipe for that, though.

[conuly]

"If the meat-packing industry is still operative, the pharmaceutical industry will be too."

Yeah, but it might be much pricier. And I bet you a dollar some of it is going to be people brewing stuff at home. Or trying to, at least. Most of the homemade medical market be useless or worse.

I'm not saying I think it would be an ideal situation, just that there is hope if the next-to-worst happens.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

For sure, it might be pricier, but I doubt there'd be much of a home-made market. Long before the survivalists' longed-for state of anarchy comes to pass, there'll be martial law, with confiscation and centralization of all food, fuel and medical supplies. This would be a better thing for the diabetics than having a lot of people making 'bathtub insulin' of unknown purity.

[conuly]

That... might well lead to the anarchy.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

It might very well, but do you think whoever's commanding whatever organized police/National Guard units are left will consider that? I don't. I think it'll be the usual Macho Military Mind-set, that just HAS to have the entire area and all its resources 'secured', no matter what the cost in lives and wasted resources. Do you remember the part in The Once And Future King where the ants are going to war, and they have all these propaganda-broadcasts about why they're justified in taking the food of the other ants? It'd be exactly like that. They've already built the concentration camps.

Obama Explains The FEMA Camps (http://youtu.be/HkSkQgnEV-Q)