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]

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.