Survival Sanitation: It all Begins with the Hands
by Tactical Intelligence on August 12th, 2011
This is the first post in a three-part series on survival sanitation. In a survival situation, proper sanitation is of utmost importance if you want to avoid your family getting seriously sick.
If you add a lack of medical facilities due to grid-down issues, then staying healthy becomes even more crucial.
In this series I discuss the skills you need in order to avoid getting a
nd spreading disease, and how to deal with waste and sewage when your town and city services are no longer working.
This may be a bit cliché, but having clean hands is really the first step in staying sanitary in a survival situation. Since the hands are the primary contact point with every-day objects as well as between humans, they are also the top spreaders of disease. Hand washing — although it’s a simple practice — is the single most effective way to prevent the spread of communicable diseases.
Diseases Spread through the Hands
The hands can spread disease caused by fecal-oral transmission (you or someone else goes to the bathroom, wipes, and doesn’t wash), indirect contact with respiratory secretions (coughing or sneezing into hands), and coming into contact with urine, saliva or other moist body substances (I won’t go there, but I’m sure you get the point).
Here is a list of the most common diseases that are easily spread by the hands:
DISEASES SPREAD THROUGH FECAL-ORAL TRANSMISSION
Ingesting even the tiniest particles of fecal material can infect you with any of the following:
salmonella
shigellosis (causes dysentry)
hepatitis A
giardia
enterovirus
amebiasis
campylobacteria
cholera
DISEASES SPREAD THROUGH INDIRECT CONTACT WITH RESPIRATORY SECRETIONS
influenza (flu)
Streptococcus
respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)
the common cold
DISEASES SPREAD BY CONTACT WITH BODILY FLUIDS (SALIVA, URINE, ETC)
cytomegalovirus
typhoid
staphylococcal organisms
Epstein-barr virus
Given the many types of diseases that are so easily spread through the hands it should be a given that hand washing be put at the top in terms of importance during an emergency. This cannot be overstated — if you want to prevent your family from suffering from disease, be it a mild case of diarrhea or worse, then this must become a high priority.
