Biohazards – What are they?
Biohazards are infectious agents. Both poisons and biohazards can kill, but poisons don’t multiply or develop nifty (for them) tricks to cause their own spread. Biohazards do both.
This is the biohazard symbol. Looks rather like a clump of bacterial cells seen under a microscope — appropriate since bacteria are the most common sort of biohazard.
When you think about the risk of an epidemic, you’re thinking about the spread of a biohazard. Terrorists mailing envelopes full of anthrax and (potentially) setting off aerosol bombs of some ‘superbug’ or other are examples of biohazards. From the mundane, one-person big emergency to a potential TEOTWAWKI event, preppers have reason to put biohazards near the top of their ‘Things To Prep For” lists.
Salty and I talk these four over in this podcast:
How can you protect yourself and others?
There is a team of two heroes that defend against biohazards: Your own immune system, and avoidance.
Your immune system has to handle an enormous variety of threats every day. Fortunately, it’s made to do just that. While it might not be up to protecting you from the worst threats, it really does an amazing job… especially if you help it out. Lifestyle choices like good diet, enough sleep, and regular exercise are your best bet to beefing up your immune system in general.
Then there’s the option of giving the immune system a serious head start against specific germs: Immunizations. I know, some love ‘em, some hate ‘em. That’s not today’s can of worms, so let me leave it at this for today. They don’t give people autism and they aren’t a government plot to give people diseases; but that doesn’t mean they’re all a great idea to take. You’ll make your own decisions there. I just hope you’ll keep in mind that, if you’re facing the particular threat you’ve been immunized against, it might well save your life. If it’s any other threat, the immunization will do you nada. The ‘good self-care’ thing is the flip side: It helps somewhat against every threat, but isn’t a Magic Bullet against any particular germ.
Avoiding exposure means you won’t get sick from a biohazard, Period. The hard part is the execution. There are biohazards literally everywhere – on dust particles in the air, in the soil, you name it. It boils down to reducing the bigger risks and not sweating the small stuff.
How do people get exposed?
Since avoiding exposure is such an important strategy, it really helps to know how most exposures happen. Natural exposures are the common reasons for illness, now and in disasters such as pandemics.
The easiest way to catch any pathogen (germs that will make you sick) is direct contact with body fluids from an infected person. What we call ‘sexually transmitted diseases’ mostly have no special connection to sex per se; it’s just that sex is the most common way people share body fluids. Caring for ill people is another common route of exposure.
The next most efficient transmission, for germs that can manage it, is airborne. Catching the flu from inhaling tiny droplets expelled by someone else’s cough is a great example (or awful example, since it’s pretty awful once you catch it). Legionnaire’s disease is a bacterial infection often caught this way, as it’s a naturally occurring germ that happens to like the cool, wet kind of environments you find in commercial heating and cooling systems. It was named after the first described outbreak started by the ventilation system in a hotel that had an American Legion convention.
The mask is better at catching germs when the sick person wears it. Wearing one as a healthy person does help some though, especially as it stops hand-to-nose or hand-to-mouth transmission.
Terror
Terrorists have aerosolized poisons and released them in public places already; the thought of someone doing that with a pathogen can give public health people nightmares. To mitigate this risk … well, there’s plenty of houses for sale in rural America. The Superbowl or a subway would be a really tempting target for this kind of attack; but the local diner? Not so much. Masks, by the way, work way more efficiently when worn by the sick than by the healthy.
Some germs can even persist for a time in the environment, so one person can leave them behind to expose the next poor sucker who handles the same item. This ranges from catching a cold from an elevator button to getting anthrax by doing an archeological dig on what turns out to be a thousand-year-old plague pit. (It’s happened.) Hand washing is the single most important tactic for reducing this transmission, as we mostly pick up environmental pathogens from with their hands and transfer them to their interiors by handling food or rubbing their nose or some such.
Zoonotic diseases are caught from non-humans. The big prepper worry here is influenza, since both fowl (everything from wild geese to domestic chickens) and pigs both share it with us. Anthrax is a natural zoonotic disease as well, mostly being transmitted and caught from hoofstock such as cattle. Until, that is, some lowlife evil S.O.B. sent some through the mail as an act of terror. (We don’t do politics and I almost never do hate…but I have nothing but disdain for anyone who thinks intentionally infecting people with deadly diseases is a good way to make a political point.)
Terrorism exposures to date have been scarce. May it ever be so. Original dispersals by aerosols that later spread by person-to-person contact are the elephant in the room, as being the fastest method of spread. The anthrax was a powder put in envelopes. The common theme? Exposure by inhalation. We all gotta breathe, and the air in the lungs is just two epithelial cell layers away from our blood, so is a very popular method for germs of all sorts to invade.
What do you do if you are exposed?
This section is going to be slim, mostly because the best thing is to wash self and clothes as soon as possible; and do the things your immune system likes such as eat right. Shocking, right?
Some diseases have prophylactic treatments. (That means ‘just in case, to prevent a problem’ in med-speak; it’s not limited to prevention of pregnancy.) If you know what you’ve been exposed to and the right treatment, that might be a great plan. Popping some random antibiotics on hope does not seem to me like a great plan at all. But hey, I’m not a physician, just a person who shares information on the internet; so I’m not telling you what you should do.
One more note before I sign this one off: If you do think you’ve been exposed to something nasty, please do the decent thing and self-quarantine until you know you’re clear. They teach us all to share in kindergarten (and kindergartners are The Bomb at sharing germs!) … but as we move up from there we should get some discrimination and not share pathogens if we can help it.
This is the quarantine hospital on Malta.* That’s overkill, even if you think you’ve been exposed to a nasty germ. Just keep to yourself until you’re sure you’re clear. Please?
*By Frank Vincentz [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
Thanks for the article.