Tetanus. It’s called ‘lockjaw’ because the jaw muscles are among the first to be affected. They spasm and seize up, holding the jaw firmly shut.
The good news is, starvation is not likely to be a problem.
The bad news is, the reason it’s not a problem is that other muscles will also be affected and freeze into ridigity. That’s bad enough when skeletal muscles contract so hard they break bones … but there’s also the fact that it’s a skeletal muscle that has to relax between breaths to keep air moving in and out of the lungs.
Right now, 10 – 20% of the people who develop tetanus die of it. Without modern medical care (not only antibiotics, but injections of specialized antibodies and potentially weeks on a mechanical ventilator) the rate’s much higher. Neonatal tetanus, where the newborn gets infected through an unclean umbilical stump, was responsible for 14% of neonatal deaths worldwide as late as 1998.
How do you get tetanus?
It’s not that the microbe that causes tetanus is some inherently evil thing. The vast majority of the members of the species Clostridium tetani live and die in soil (especially organic rich wet muck, Yum!), in manure, or in the guts of animals. In these places, they’re harmless. The trouble comes when they get into one’s tissues. You don’t catch tetanus from another human, you get it when the microbes enter through breaks in the skin.
Harmless little matchsticks? In the soil, sure. Under your skin, not so much.
My mom was convinced that stepping on rusty barbed wire (half buried in the dirt) was inviting tetanus. She kind of had a point. It’s dirty and often found where there’s animal manure in the soil. It causes puncture wounds that force the dirt and microbes in deep. It’s hard to wash the wound clean, and there’s not much oxygen down in the wound. Tetanus microbes can’t grow where there’s plenty of oxygen. Really though, one can get tetanus from about any scratch, as the microbes aren’t at all rare.
No better place than No Man’s land to get tetanus. Rusty wire doesn’t cause tetanus, but it can help introduce it and is often found where tetanus is abundant.
What can be done about it?
So what does a prepper do if signs of tetanus develop? *insert thundering silence* . There’s not a whole lot to be done actually. Well, antibiotics may help, but they’re not a great answer. For one, it’s hard to get the drugs where the microbes are — in low oxygen areas, which means they’re not getting good blood flow. Another problem is that the microbes kill by producing a toxin. It’s the toxin that circulates in the blood, affects the neurons, and leads to the excessive muscle contraction. Antibiotics won’t remove toxins already circulating; that’s why modern treatments use immunoglobulins.
Cleaning wounds right after they’re made will reduce the number of microbes, and that makes tetanus less likely to develop. There’s a previous post on this site about irrigating wounds…
The best protection is vaccination
I know that many people in the prepper community don’t trust vaccines. I also know how many people have died, in very unpleasant ways, from tetanus. (The toll was particularly horrid in WWI, with all the wounds from shell fragments full of dirt. And, you know, rusty barbed wire.) This is not a disease you can protect yourself from by avoiding doing stupid, and the microbes that cause it are ubiquitous. It’s not a disease you can expect to cure with prepper medicine, either. Also, a vaccinated mother is far less likely to have her newborn develop the neonatal version, as the infant starts out with some protection that Mom passed along.
The protection from this vaccination doesn’t last full strength lifelong, so it’s best to get a booster every decade. That is one cheap, easy prep that might well save your life; or the life of your newborn.
Even tough guys get tetanus vaccines