What Do You Do In An Epidemic Disaster?

You will have to deal with an Epidemic disaster. They are inevitable. Sooner or later they will end up in your neighborhood. Maybe you and your neighborhood will be lucky and only get a bad case of a flu outbreak and nothing more serious. Maybe not. There are fun things out there like Ebola and of course, Bird Flu, or in geek talk, "Avian Influenza". You need to know about these things to take care of yourself and your loved ones.


When we get a very large epidemic they call it a "pandemic". We needed this word because people travel quickly over very wide areas of the whole world now. That means diseases can travel quickly over very wide areas of the whole world now.


Some of the old diseases that were not a threat are coming back because of lack of inoculations for them, also things like antibiotic resistance in germs. 


We are getting new diseases as well. Some of the reasons given for these are interesting. One says that we are sending rockets, satellites and high altitude jets up into areas of the atmosphere that have never come into human contact before. There are bacteria and viruses floating up there that have never come into human contact before either. That means we have no resistance to them. Contact with germs we have no resistance to means we can be very sick.


Another idea is that when people clear cut jungle and forest areas in order to raise beef for cheap fast food burgers we come into contact with germs there that we have no resistance to either. Same story as the high altitude germs. No previous contact gets us very sick from those germs too.


My own favorite is that the thinning of the ozone layer has exposed germs to more ultraviolet light rays. Ultraviolet light rays are responsible for most mutations of species. Longer lived species with smaller numbers of offspring have a disadvantage in the helpful mutations category. That would include microscopic life forms in the advantageous mutations category and humans in the disadvantaged category. That would mean humans get sick from the mutated super bugs.


It doesn't matter a lot why we are getting super bug diseases that make epidemics. We are getting them. Nobody is doing anything to stop any of the causes. We are running out of new antibiotics faster than we get resistant strains of disease, and new diseases.  We don't have a very effective way to stop the spread of these diseases. 


Epidemic disease experts agree that it is only a matter of time before we get a worldwide pandemic disease. 


I am especially interested in pandemic disease because I live in an area where it is more likely to happen sooner than other areas. Avian Flu, or bird flu is very likely where I live. We have birds that migrate through here from all over the world. That gives us lots more chances to get Bird Flu.


I am trying to make these posts simpler and easier to understand so that also can mean shorter. I am going to write more, about what you can do if a pandemic happens where you live, in another post.