Post-TEOTWAWKI disease

One of the things that Doomer Porn usually doesn’t consider is the realistic nuts and bolts of how various aspects of the world will work after some Big Thing happens and The World Changes Forever. I’m all for a willing suspension of disbelief to allow a story to move along, but when you ask me to give up the good sense I was born with, that’s a bit much.

One of the most common objections I have to many multi-volume doomer series is the lack of outbreaks of common and once-common diseases in the aftermath of the Big Thing. As I’ve noted before, I really don’t expect to see these ravening hordes of starving refugees roaming the countryside, because most of them will be dead in 30 days from fun things like water-borne disease. Face it, most people have never been in the Boy Scouts and they haven’t learned not to shit in their water supply. They’re going to hit the road looking to make their way to Farmer Bob’s where they just know there is food and they’ll run out of those 4 bottles of Deer Park they were so proud they remembered about mid-afternoon on Day 1. By mid-afternoon on Day 2 they will be in agony from thirst, and that creek they spot will look so…wet. They won’t know where it comes from or what might be in it besides H₂O and they won’t care. Glug, glug, glug.

Somewhere around Day 5-7 they won’t care about anything, because they’ll be dead from something or other. Whether it’s chemical or biological makes no difference, dead is dead. Saint Peter is going to be putting on extra shifts, because I expect this to be happening all over.

A writer for SurvivalBlog has written a two part (Part 1 and Part 2) on the various diseases that can be expected to make a comeback in the event of an Event. Interesting reading for those of us with this particular turn of mind.

You do have effective water filtration gear in those preps, now don’t you?