How to Live in The Pandemicene
Without losing our minds.
Bird flu, it's in the news again.
I've been following H5N1 and other diseases for several years now, and a certain pattern has emerged. Bottom line, we live in a different world than we did a few years ago. Now, diseases are making comebacks. If it's not one, it's another. Flu. Covid. Measles. Mpox. Tuberculosis. Pneumonia. Health experts are almost always predicting another pandemic at some point in the near future, and mainstream news is always telling us the threat remains low. This year, early coverage of bird flu insisted that the virus would have zero impact on our lives, and now we hear that the U.S. turkey flock has "shrunk to its smallest size in 40 years, and a fall rebound in avian flu cases is adding fresh strain ahead of Thanksgiving." Well, of course it is. Are you surprised?
I'm not.
The climate crisis was always going to raise prices on meat, a resource intensive thing to produce, even without diseases in the mix.
Of course, a turkey shortage doesn't mean much to those of us who live mainly on oats, beans, pasta, and dried veggies. Moving to a nearly vegan diet makes the most sense to anyone who's actually been paying attention for the last several years. Meat? Eggs? Dairy? For a person who's collapse aware, these products are only going to pose more and more problems as the years go on.
Every now and then, someone tells me they're not that interested in public health because they care more about climate change or collapse in general. Well, the collapse of public health is very much part of the climate crisis, and it's very much part of the more general collapse. In my view, we're far more likely to get mowed down by a disease before we face anything like a global famine. The science backs this up.
Just look around...
We're still in the middle of the second longest government shutdown in modern history, and I've got bad news. MAGA Republicans want this. The Trump administration wants this. They're using the shutdown to conduct another round of government purges. As I recently wrote, they've already axed core leadership at the CDC. Obviously, they're going to rehire some of these people, but not most of them.
That's the point.
Disease will shape the future. Whatever protest you go to, whatever genocides happen next, wherever you go, airborne threats will be waiting. As climate disasters upend our neighborhoods and cities, diseases will be there to attack us when we're at our most vulnerable. Some of these diseases, like Covid, disrupt people's ability to think and reason in the long term. They compound every other problem.
A few years ago, Ed Yong told us about the pandemicene. More climate research has only reinforced these points. The climate crisis is going to unleash a chain of pandemic events in our lifetimes. The last administration gave up on its public health promises, and this regime walks them back further. Forget clean air in public buildings, these flunkies won't even guarantee vaccines. The media offers the worst coverage possible. Either by design or just sheer incompetence, they're not on the ball.
So, how do we live going forward? We can't spend the rest of our lives getting whiplashed by shoddy coverage of every potential viral threat on our lives. And we can't rely on a dysfunctional government. In fact, you could even plausibly say that we don't have a government anymore.
Here's what I do:
Get a HOCl Generator, Make Steam
Your own white blood cells generate hypochlorous acid (HOCl) to destroy pathogens. It's a vital part of your immune system. I've already written about it a few times. You can use HOCl to disinfect just about anything, including your food.
But it's even more useful than that.
For several months now, we've been pouring HOCl into a cool mist humidifier and using it as an additional layer of defense. We just follow the basic instructions to make it at 200 ppm, within the safe range. The idea goes like this: You breathe HOCL steam, and it kills pathogens in your airways. It also fogs the air.
It seems to work.
My daughter got Covid over the summer. We didn't. I believe it's because we used HOCl steam for several hours a day and several hours at night. I believe it also helped clear her infection and lower the risk of Long Covid. Our cat got an infection, and HOCL helped with that, too. We still took them to the vet, but the vet said whatever our cat had was resolved. So, another endorsement. Now, we use HOCl steam every week, especially when we have to attend events. My kid still goes to an outdoor school twice a week, and she does HOCl when we get home.
We do this on top of masking and vaccines.
Look, people can accuse me selling snake oil if they want. I'm not selling anyone anything. I'm just telling everyone what we do.
Find the right supplements
For a year now, I've been working on a big list of supplements with actual peer-reviewed evidence to show they work.
That article does a careful review of the studies on supplements like echinacea, elderberry, olive leaf, cinnamon, and quercetin. It also pulls out the exact information on dosage and reputable brands that I could find. One reader on here pointed me to Consumer Lab, so I cross-checked everything there. They're a great resource for evaluating the safety and effectiveness of these supplements, since our government won't do it.
Ultimately, we settled on a basic quercetin supplement, since that's found in several of the other compounds. The best brands offer roughly 500-600 mg per dose, and you don’t want much more than 1 gram of quercetin anyway. The brands include Life Extension, Solaray, BulkSupplements.com, and Swanson. Thorne also sells a quercetin supplement, but that one wasn’t evaluated by Consumer Lab.
No single article can explain every detail of these supplements or their interactions with other medicines or conditions, but it's a start.
Take it and build on it.
Pay attention to your food
I've also written a detailed account on how to keep your food safe. It covers the temperatures you need to reach for most foods, for different types of pathogens. Generally, boiling and pressure cooking work really well.
So does steaming.
We've simply given up a lot of problem foods. We gave up meat a long time ago. It's just simple calculus. As for eggs, think about it. They say you're fine as long as you cook them to a certain temperature, but they don't tell you where egg gets when you cook. It gets everywhere. The same thing goes for meat.
Things splash. They splatter. They fling. They drip. They spill.
We don't want to run our kitchen like a meth lab, so we just eliminated the highest risk foods. We steam our vegetables. We soak things in HOCl. We find ways to get our nutrients from other sources.
Personally, I like plant-based sour cream. I like plant-based cheese. I like oat milk, and you can buy brands that have calcium added.
Nobody can tell you how to eat, but it seems like a lot of trouble to keep eating meat and dairy. And it's only going to get harder.
And more expensive.
Develop newsfeed resilience
It's exhausting and annoying to chase down every threat on your life, and that's how "doomers" got such a bad rep to begin with.
Instead...
Understand the patterns. We don't need every real-time update on bird flu or Covid to know what we should be doing on a daily basis, even if we just like staying informed. You can step back from the emotional gauntlet of daily news without checking out of reality altogether. In fact, it's essential.
Aerosol scientists like Lisa Marr have shown rather definitively that diseases spread in the air. It's a fundamental shift in how humans have to think. We also understand, now, that there's no such thing as a good illness. There's never a good reason to get sick. Your immune system doesn't need training.
So, masks and air purifiers. And whatever else. Every day. Just like putting on a seatbelt. Just like locking your doors at night.
Personally, I find it strange to talk about prepping and collapse while ignoring the diseases that are currently posing a grave and immediate risk to our health, a threat bound up with the climate crisis, and an inseparable part of collapse. Are you going to prepare for a famine, are you going to grow taters in your back yard, but you're not going to wear a mask when you go out in public? That sounds weird to me.
It doesn't have to be that hard.
Other people just make it hard for us.
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