If a disaster throws you off the grid, your risk of traumatic injury increases but also that of infection. When someone thinks of an infectious disease event, they envision a deadly epidemic. Any catastrophe, however, can increase the number of people with infections. When I say “catastrophe”, I’m not talking losing power from a storm for three days; I’m talking about a true long-term survival scenario.
In these horrific events, dirty wounds, contaminated water, poorly prepared food, and inadequate sanitation will turn previously healthy people into desperately sick ones. With antibiotics in your medical storage, you have a good shot of nipping those infections in the bud. Not having them could lead to tragic consequences.
One of the most frequent questions I receive from readers, listeners, and viewers is which antibiotics to have on hand in survival settings. I have received a flurry of these lately in response to our new book “Alton’s Antibiotics and Infectious Disease”: The Layman’s Guide To Available Antibacterials in Austere Settings. In the book, I discuss, well, antibiotics and infectious disease: The infections to be expected in those knocked off the gird and the antibiotics obtainable by the average citizen that help prevent otherwise avoidable deaths.
(NOTE: I don’t sell antibiotics nor own any part of a company that does.)
Certainly, it would be great if you had the financial resources to have all of the medications we talk about in Alton’s Antibiotics and Infectious Disease, but that’s beyond the means of almost everyone. You’ll probably need to pick a limited number to stockpile, but which? Chances are, if you lined up 10 doctors, you’d get 10 different answers.
Your choices would depend on the infections you’re most likely to encounter. Is it wound infections you’re concerned about, or intestinal infections like dysentery or cholera? Does someone in your group have a medical condition that makes them prone to a certain infection? Certainly, one drug doesn’t cure all.
Without knowing your individual situation, I can’t give you specifics. I can, however, still give you my personal recommendation of a few antibiotics available in aquarium and avian form that would be assets in my survival medicine cabinet. This article would be too long to mention every disease these drugs treat or dosing (our book is more than 300 pages long), but I’ll mention a little about each.
