The Non-Dudebro's Guide to the Apocalypse

That's gonna leave us with plastic or glass mixed in; there's not actually a whole lot of metal in a needle, really. It's an idea, though, and having a small foundry to melt down non-functional metal items that aren't useful to us any more would be a good idea.

 

Gimme a whetstone and i can sharpen stuff. only did knives so far but it can't be that hard, right?

 

Short term easier solution for getting up and started right away would be to make glass needles.

 

wouldn't those break easily? /knows very little about glass and needles

 

They would, that's why metal would be preferred, but like I said, it's a quick, short term solution. a glass kiln is a lot easier to get set up than a foundry, and creating tiny hollow tubes with a sharp end takes a bit less skill with a more easily worked and forgiving material.

 

According to wikipedia, the first hypodermic needles were made of goose feathers. That sounds really really difficult to make sanitary, but maybe easier than setting up a whole forge at least to start out with? And feathers are very renewable, so only being able to use them once isn't a problem.

 

My feather allergy would be an issue there, but asides from that, it'd at least be a short-term solution until we had a working forge. Fortunately, I don't have anything that requires me to need regular needle-sticks, so it'd probably be more of an abstract issue for me.

 

I think a more interesting issue would be how to synthesize vaccinations because I'll admit I have no knowledge of the technical process, but I'll be damned if we get taken out by something silly like tetanus.

 

Also antibiotics. I once read a fic where a character went back in time and then a bit later cured some other characters of pneumonia by having them drink bread mold slurry. would that actually work like at all, or would it just be disgusting with no benefit?

edit: unless antibiotics have already been discussed in this thread, and my brain is just being a sieve right now...

 

Penicillin is, technically, a bread mold - but it's a specific strain of bread mold, there'd need to be a bunch of tests to make sure that you had the right kind. So it might work, but the odds are better for "really gross, with no significant benefit". I'm not sure how we'd synthesize vaccines, either.

 

Also would have to account for common allergies to that particular strain, so no, "drink this moldy bread slush" is probably a very bad idea.

 

a statement that should really have been self-evident, in retrospect

 

Also, fungus growing is very tricky to do in a sterile fashion. It would absolutely be possible to do, but you'd have to have someone with steady hands and a working knowledge of sterile compounding, at the least.

Oh, I suppose that's another apocalypse skill I've got - my mom's a pharmacy tech and I'm in school for medical lab things, so I'm very familiar with sterile techniques and given proper materials can do some basic tests. You'd be surprised how low tech a lot of bacterial identification can be.

 

might work, i sort of envision the needle just bending since the subcutaneous needles are pretty thin.

and re: sharps, i think they autoclave the whole sealed container and then ??? landfill? what happens next idek

wiki:

 

skinning is a good skill that i would like to learn. probably pretty useful, altho you'd need to learn preserving/tanning as well

 

dump them in alcohol and burn them, and then don't burn your finger after the sterilisation.

but yeah, subcutaneous needles are probably a bit above my skill level at this point.... practice makes perfect, i guess

 

I love the internet. It has things like articles for diabetics facing the zombie apocalypse.

Apparently "Puerto Rico also has many medical manufacturing factories and good climate, and it has the added bonus of being an island, so it offers a finite amount of rotting corpses to fight." I guess we could find a boat?

 

pandemic has been saying this for years wrt madagascar

 

Madagascar is fucking awful to infect yes. So is iceland.

 

really? I've always had the most trouble with Greenland, personally.