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.