Survive- The Economic Collapse

by Piero San Giorgio

  With these warnings in mind, let’s put on our surgical masks and gloves, pick up our scalpels, and start the operation.

  Basic Hygiene

  Hygiene refers to all behavior designed to keep you in good health. You must know how to distinguish between good microbes and those that are pathogenic or can become so in certain circumstances (which good hygiene attempts to prevent or mitigate). Hygiene seeks to master the environmental factors which can contribute to weakening health, such as pollution, but also numerous risk factors intrinsically linked to one’s lifestyle. Care of the body, physical activity, nourishment, work, and addictions have a universal impact on individual health.

  Let’s begin with lifestyle.

  Four factors allow one to prolong one’s lifespan considerably and make it more pleasant:

  Abstention from tobacco. Withdrawal should be quick. . . . In an economic crisis, the disappearance of cigarette factories should help you kick the habit.

  Moderation in one’s consumption of alcohol. (Let’s define “moderate” as one glass of wine per meal).

  Daily consumption of mostly fruits and vegetables rather than fats and sugars. You must cultivate enough vegetables and have enough fruit trees available. Fats will be relatively scarce in your post-collapse diet, and while the latent sugars contained in cereals or potatoes are relatively welcome, refined sugars will be almost absent.

  Daily physical exercise. You are unlikely to miss out on this in your SAB!

  Avoid acute or chronic pollution, whether biological or chemical, or from sound or light (these factors add to or multiply each other’s effects), which are also a significant source of illness. Try to avoid these problems. Prevention is the best medicine. Good health, good nutrition, and a fit, balanced and enduring physique will be your best protection:

  Start by eating natural foods—avoid industrially produced meat, eat those vegetables that are in season and buy your food at the market if you can, all the more as it is less expensive. Eliminate snacks and junk food. Buy smaller plates. All this will require discipline, but will be an excellent investment.

  Practice an endurance sport as well as one that is rapid and intense. Walk or get at least half an hour’s worth of activity each day. Lose your excess weight, but try to keep a five-to-10-pound surplus, as this extra body fat will be a welcome reserve in a crisis.

  When you are living in your SAB, your physical condition will be very useful given what you will have to do (cut wood, fetch water, etc.). If you are already in shape, it will be one less thing to worry about.

  Next, let us consider washing and cleanliness in general. Washing refers to the removal of undesirable matter, organic (grease), or mineral (dust or tartar) that can contain microorganisms. Disinfection allows the direct removal of certain microorganisms. Detergency consists in removing undesirable foreign substances that adhere to an item or living tissue by dissolving them. Washing generally involves four things: mechanical action (water pressure, rubbing), chemical action (the dissolution of certain materials, including fats), water temperature, which helps to remove contaminants, and, finally, the duration of detergent action. Good hygienic practices regarding the materials used in the food industry and the cleaning procedures applied after each item has been prepared allow healthy food to be produced, and thus permit longer conservation. The method and product to use depends on the nature of the undesirable foreign substances and the fragility of the object to be cleaned. For bodily hygiene, soap and warm water under no more than slight pressure is fine, but for equipment, more aggressive methods should be employed. Cleaning and detergents only have a temporary effect, of course, and must be repeated regularly. This is why one must be careful to wash one’s hands with soap and dry them before cooking, handling food or a wound, or carrying out any other task involving the risk of infection or contamination. One must also wash one’s hands thoroughly after using the toilet, handling animals or soil, coming into contact with excrement, chemical, or toxic products or playing with children. You must be careful to stock a lot of soap in your SAB.

  Here is a typical example illustrating the need for cleanliness. A child has worms and scratches the area affected. Since he does not wash his hands, his fingers and nails are covered with hundreds of little worm eggs invisible to the naked eye. If he touches food, puts his fingers in someone’s mouth, or plays with other children, he may contaminate other persons. If this doesn’t sound too serious, imagine that the case involves a deadly bacteria or virus.

  You must be able to disinfect and sterilize things. Disinfection consists in killing, removing, or deactivating microorganisms (parasites, bacteria) or viruses. When disinfection involves living tissue, it is called antiseptics; when it involves medical materials, it is called decontamination. The effects of antiseptics and disinfection are limited in duration. Sterilization consists of eliminating all microorganisms from a material and conditioning the material to maintain this state of sterility. The principal methods used for disinfection and sterilization are chemicals, temperature and pressure (pasteurization, autoclaves), and, finally, radiation. If you are a doctor yourself, or have a doctor in your SAB, it would be useful for you (or him) to prepare the materials necessary for sterilizing medical tools—typically a small autoclave—and a little vacuum-packaging machine to keep them sterile until their next use. Otherwise, boiling water and soap cover the great majority of needs.

  One must adopt hygienic behavior and make it a habit. This does not mean becoming obsessive or maintaining the hygienic level of an operating room! It simply means avoiding bacterial or viral contamination. Do not worry: with your agricultural activity, contact with animals, life in the open air, you will have plenty of occasions to immunize yourself. Remember that your work and good health are indispensable to your family and the proper functioning of your SAB, and that the less you are sick or weakened, the better everyone will feel. Good personal hygiene is important not only for your health but also for your mindset. Maintaining civilized decorum and cleanliness is important. Be clean: wash your hair and hands, clean your nails, shave. If you are clean, it will also be easier to get the respect of others. The difference between a disciplined, self-respecting person or organization and a band of louse-infested refugees leaps out to any observer.

  You must take care never to let animals, which may have come into contact with sources of bacteria or viruses, enter any of the rooms of your house, lick children, or climb into your beds. If this happens, clean the persons and objects that were touched. By animals, I mean all animals, including those called domestic: cats, dogs, etc. Keep all your animals clean and healthy, whether livestock or pets. Get a veterinarian to verify that they have no parasites, and then learn to make this kind of verification yourself. The excrement of healthy herbivores (but not cats, dogs, or pigs!) can be added to compost and used as a fertilizer. You must ensure that no one, especially not children, do their business on the ground in or around the home. Everyone must be made to use toilets or latrines. Sheets, clothing, and linens must regularly be put out in the sun, as in Mediterranean countries, since ultraviolet rays in sunlight have great power to sterilize against many microbes. Regularly check your bedding, especially if you experience itchiness, for fleas, ticks, etc. Keep your hair clean and your nails short, and treat any symptoms as quickly as possible. In case of lice, ticks, mites, or bedbugs, make sure you wash your sheets, slipcovers, bedspreads, and all bedding in boiling water. Tampons and all other elements used to absorb blood, and which cannot be washed, must be burned or buried deep and far from the garden or grazing fields. Be careful not to spit on the ground, not to urinate or defecate anywhere but in your toilet or latrine, and to wash your hands after every meal, every trip to the toilet, each time you touch an animal or an object that may have been exposed to bacterial or viral contamination. In case of illness, even a minor one, separate the sick person from healthy people. Clean your rooms often: floors, walls and underneath the furniture. Fill in holes that could house in
sects (roaches) and other animals (not to mention lizards, snakes, scorpions, and other warm-weather creatures). Keep things in order, for this will make it easier for you to find what you need. Leave shoes outside at the entrance to your house. You might consider wearing indoor shoes in the house.

  Here’s another example to illustrate the importance of cleanly behavior: a man ill with dysentery cannot control himself and defecates behind the barn wall. Without being seen, he covers the deed with a bit of soil and goes on his way. A little pig passes by, poking its snout into everything. This little pig still has traces of human feces on its snout when the household children play with it. Later on, one of the children gets hungry and cries. His mother takes the child on her knees and gives him a bit of the food she is preparing and returns to the kitchen. The poor women does not realize her hands have touched the child’s and that now, by touching the food she is preparing, she risks contaminating the whole family. The next day, everyone wakes up with stomach pains and the urge to run to the latrines! One might smile at this story if dysentery did not kill 100,000 people per year across the world.

  Hygiene is of great importance to water and food.

  We have already described how to purify water. It is equally important to have pure water for cleaning food. You must watch out for bacterial or viral infection. Take thought to avoid any food that is spoiled or otherwise unfit for consumption; eating it could give you food poisoning. Also beware of cooked food that has been lying around for several hours. Try to eat freshly prepared food, especially if you are sick.

  Persons with tuberculosis, colds, sore throats, and other highly contagious illnesses should take their meals separately; their plates, glasses, and silverware should be washed carefully, especially after use.

  You must always carefully wash your hands with soap before cooking, and wash your kitchen workspace. The most important point is to avoid any contact between animal or human fecal matter and the food you are going to consume. So when you are dressing animal carcasses, be careful with the offal, especially the intestines, so they do not contaminate the rest of the meat. Wash fruits and vegetables with water before peeling in order to eliminate parasites, microorganisms, worms, and animal excrement. Do not let fruits or vegetables touch eggshells that do not originate in egg-crates. Cooking should be done so as to ensure the destruction of any possible bacteria or viruses. Meat and fish must be fully cooked; vegetables and fruits that are steamed, cooked, or boiled for 20 to 30 minutes usually present no bacterial or viral danger. To conserve food, protect it with lids, cans, transparent film, or aluminum. Do not keep them at above 50 °F (10 °C); beyond that point, bacterial development accelerates. If you do not have a refrigerator, consider installing a cool room in your cellar. In any case, do not put sensitive products (meat, fish) in contact with those that might contaminate them (unpeeled fruits and vegetables). Thaw items in the refrigerator (rather than in the open air) in order to avoid the development of germs. Tools, cans, and jars used for conserves should be sterilized with boiling water after use. After cooking, clean your workplace, utensils, dishes, ground, and your hands, especially when you have handled raw animal products.

  Finally, you must properly manage your garbage. For garbage, you should never use any containers you plan to reuse for keeping food. Then some good news: since you are going to recycle a large part of everything you use—organic waste for compost, wood and paper for heating, metal for recasting, etc.—you will have very little real garbage! Plan on having garbage bags of various sizes for sorting and storing plastic and other materials. Those you cannot sell or recycle can be burned or buried at a distance from your vegetable garden. The golden rule with garbage is never to let it pollute your grounds or (especially) your water supply—or those of your neighbors.

  Toilets and Waste Management

  No one likes to talk about it, but human waste must be managed, one’s own and that of others. Indeed, the proper elimination of human waste is a fundamental element of good hygiene. If you have ever experienced a cut in the water supply to your house or apartment, you will quickly have understood how important working toilets are. The quantity of excrement produced by a normal adult quickly becomes a sizable problem. In fact, each adult will produce one liter of urine and over a pound of feces per day. Multiply this by the number of persons living in your SAB, and you will see that it rapidly becomes a significant quantity, a source of disagreeable odors and, above all, of potential illnesses. If you have access to a source of water with a pump, if your house or farm is equipped with modern toilets that flush properly, you can use them and consider yourself lucky. But if your toilets no longer flush properly, do not use them any more! You need another solution. Verify that if the sewers break down or overflow, the excess does not flow in the direction of your home. If sewers do overflow, it’s time for some emergency plumbing, and it would probably be a good idea to block the access to the sewers.

  The ultimate solution is to construct latrines or “composting toilets” outside. The good news is that for 12,000 years, we have known how to do this.

  Latrines must be, at a minimum, 20 meters or 65 feet from any habitation or water or food source (e.g. vegetable garden). They should also be inaccessible to animals—especially pigs and dogs. This can be accomplished with a simple enclosure.

  Verify that the natural drainage beneath the latrine does not flow toward a vegetable garden, river, or other source of water.

  Dig a pit as deep as possible—a depth of three meters or 10 feet or more is fine—to allow for the maximum amount of excrement and reduce the problem of flies and odor. Ideally, install a ventilation duct for odors and place it away from the latrine. It will act like a chimney and evacuate bad odors.

  Take care to arrange for a minimum level of comfort in case of rain with a roof and wind protection.

  Arm yourself with a bag of sawdust, wood shavings, or ashes to throw by the handful on your waste after each session. You will need a cubic meter per person per year of such material.

  Make sure to have toilet paper or newsprint, and ideally a pitcher of water to clean yourself and the seat (if you have installed one) or any “misses.” Close the hole of the latrine until the next use.

  Teach everyone, especially children, to do their business correctly in these latrines.

  If the latrine fills up too quickly, before it overflows, dig another farther away.

  Wash your hands with soap after using the latrine.

  The advantages of having a latrine are numerous:

  They save water. These “flushless” toilets avoid wasting between three and 12 liters of drinking water per use.

  They don’t burden plumbing systems. Salts do not easily degrade in water. The bacteria and chemical substances we excrete require lengthy treatment to become harmless. So flushing will continue to increase the burden on any treatment plants that may still be running.

  They do not make the noise of flushing toilets. There is no problem of pipes freezing in the case of external toilets in cold regions.

  They reduce the risk of epidemics. Villages in poor countries that correctly use latrines almost never suffer epidemics, and their inhabitants do much better than those of the shantytowns that make use of “flying toilets.” (Waste is placed in plastic bags and thrown as far away as possible from the hut: onto another hut, or even into a public street. Think about that.)

  Water that has been used for various types of cleaning (dishes, linen, clothes, etc.) should also be disposed of correctly, that is, not into a river that can be used for other purposes. You can create filtering systems and natural drainage into the ground (with the help of rock strata, gravel, and sand) that will slowly but effectively filter waste water.

  Oral and Dental Hygiene

  The collapse of the economy will have one advantage: you will no longer have to go to the dentist! Other than the few remaining country dentists who still have the old machines that work with a pedal, most dentists will not be able to operate
as their high-tech equipment becomes unusable or uneconomical. The bad news is that if you have poor teeth, bad dental care, or cavities, you will suffer the pains of a martyr and greatly miss your cleaning sessions with your old dentist as sweet moments of pleasure. Prevention must be emphasized, the goal being to avoid developing cavities. These are caused by bacteria in the mouth that transform sugars into lactic acid, which, in turn, attacks dental enamel, demineralizing it until a cavity appears. Many different types of food can cause cavities. If a cavity gets deep enough, it hits the nerve, which is quite painful, and can allow bacteria to enter the blood and nervous system. This can cause very painful abscesses, sometimes even death by blood poisoning and pericardial infection. An untreated cavity can be especially serious for a pregnant woman. Fortunately, saliva allows the acidity level of the mouth to return to a normal level. Unfortunately, no one’s natural defenses are able to fully counteract the effects of these acids; and some people are simply more susceptible to cavities than others. This makes prevention all the more important. Cavities are above all prevented by:

  Good oral and dental hygiene. Careful brushing twice a day (morning and evening) is imperative from an early age. Use a soft brush with a fluoride toothpaste and dental floss in order to prevent the formation of cavities between teeth. Once a week, rinse your teeth with a fluoride solution. If you have no toothbrush, it is possible to use a soft piece of wood in place. If you have no toothpaste, use a bit of clay or bicarbonate of soda. If you have no dental floss, use vegetal fibers. Be careful not to injure your gums. If you do not have access to a toothbrush, sugar-free chewing gum can be used to promote salivation (which reduces acidity in the mouth) as you await the next mechanical brushing.