Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter | Vol. XXXVI, No. 4
Between the date on the masthead and the time of this writing (January 2021), events have moved at a breathtaking speed. With a foot-high pile of selected articles on COVID-19 waiting to be read, I’d like to pause for historical perspective.
DDP was founded in the early 1980s, when medical journals were full of articles on the “bomb run,” the effects of a nuclear attack on one or more American cities: death and destruction, the few remaining medical facilities overwhelmed, environmental contamination, panic, and despair (hope to be at Ground Zero, kiss yourself good-by, etc.).
At that time, during the Cold War, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) still had an Office of Civil Defense and remnants of a civilian nuclear defense program. DDP and The American Civil Defense Association (TACDA) promoted these programs, and FEMA officials spoke at our meetings. There were home shelter displays.
The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine worked with FEMA on mobile nuclear/biological/chemical shelter displays. One with the FEMA emblem was at the National Emergency Training Center at Emmitsburg, Md., and one with the Pennsylvania state seal was taken on a tour of state fairs. Physicians for Civil Defense was founded to support an Arizona shelter display and exhibit it at county fairs.
Some of the experts who developed and tested American civil defense were opposed to these efforts because they believed the government would never undertake a proper program as existed in Switzerland and the Soviet Union. Thus, all efforts should be focused on expedient do-it-yourself methods, they said. They proved to be right.
Cresson Kearny’s Nuclear War Survival Skills, with all instructions developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and field-tested by ordinary Americans, is the indispensable survival manual for nuclear war and other crises. OISM used to provide it to FEMA to give to state and local emergency managers. A hard copy is best, but you can download it free at www.oism.org/nwss. If you don’t have one, get it now and print it out while you still can.
Stephen Jones and his associates delivered donated radiation meters and copies of NWSS to Arizona rural fire departments, urging them to read at least the first 30 pages. They were eager for the information, as they are responsible for responding to a nuclear event but have had no training whatsoever to prepare them. Big city departments, however, refused to listen or to accept information. Videos are available on YouTube.com; search for “roadman911.”
As part of the mobile shelter displays, DDP developed a sample medical kit and delivered one to FEMA. But FEMA refused to accept it, citing concerns about the “dangerous drugs,” which might be stolen and misused. There were no controlled substances in the kit, just over-the-counter medications and commonly used prescription drugs like antibiotics, all of which of course can be misused.
Last we heard, the FEMA shelter itself was buried, possibly to be used in some way to train firefighters. Other than at one DDP meeting, it was never viewed by the public. The Arizona emergency management department determined that it did not want the Arizona display parked on its property, so it was moved to a private location.
States discontinued their programs to maintain and calibrate radiation monitoring instruments. Shane Connor (ki4u.com) saved many of them from going to a landfill and maintains the only private facility we know of in the U.S. that can calibrate instruments. He also offers some advanced monitoring technology, including the RADTriage™ card; the NukAlert ER, tragically, was unsustainable because of lack of governmental support.
THE ONGOING MEDICAL CRISIS
The nuclear device hasn’t exploded yet, despite nuclear proliferation, but the nation is nonetheless being crippled. The situation resembles an attack with a neutron bomb that kills or terrorizes people while causing minimal damage to infrastructure (except that destroyed by the initial blast or by civil unrest). There is also widespread contamination by something invisible, odorless, and tasteless—and not nearly as easy to detect as ionizing radiation. Also, unlike radiation, biological agents, once in a receptive host, have a doubling time instead of a half-life. This “poor man’s atomic bomb” could be the most destructive of all weapons of mass destruction. And of course, natural pandemics have devastated human populations throughout history.
Fear of COVID-19 is pervasive, even though the all-cause mortality rate is currently not exceptional. Some hospitals are overwhelmed. Some lost capacity and staffing because elective procedures—hence revenue—were stopped by government orders in the “first wave” and because of frequent quarantines based on positive tests.
Of course, we could never do enough bone-marrow transplants in a last-ditch effort to save thousands of radiation-poisoning victims. Nor can we provide enormously expensive new remedies to millions of coronavirus victims. The key is prevention and early treatment. For nuclear attack, the government’s ready.gov advice is shockingly inadequate. For coronavirus, the only reliable sources of information are supposedly the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Their “shelter in place,” mask, and handwashing advice has not stemmed the epidemic. Therapeutic nihilism is their official position on early treatment.
Though infrastructure is mostly intact and there are no bodies piled in the streets, the U.S. system is strained and threatened with sudden collapse as a culmination of decades-long policies as well as coronacrisis response dictates. These include: (1) outsourcing our supply chain—e.g., the U.S. is dependent on China for 90% of our drugs, (2) just-in-time inventories, (3) destroying reserve (“excess”) capacity, (4) constraints on medical education opportunities, (5) consolidation of medical facilities under the control of a few giant cartels, and (6) increasing dependency on government funding.
Patients are finding it difficult to get medical appointments, and it appears that most doctors are unwilling to deviate from the dogma of therapeutic nihilism for COVID. Many patients are already resorting to D.I.Y. medicine. If the supply chain is interrupted—or if infrastructure collapses, what will Americans do? The biggest threat might be collapse of the electric grid, even without the dreaded electromagnetic pulse (EMP), through targeted attacks on substations or hacking by enemies foreign or domestic.
In a crisis, you will have to rely on what you already have and on printed information. It is increasingly difficult to acquire supplies—and possession by unauthorized persons might violate regulations in some areas. DDP has at last updated our 1980s medkit, which has obscurely resided on our website for years. It can be downloaded from: ddponline.org/medkit. Print it out! Realize that it is only intended for a crisis in which professional guidance is unavailable. It represents the opinion of a few physicians and is not intended to serve as individual medical advice. It is our NWSS strategy for medicine.
DDP, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd. Suite 9, Tucson, AZ 85716, 520.325.2680, www.ddponline.org. Follow us on Twitter @d4dp.