Where There Is a Need, There Is a Way - When Disaster Strikes - page 6

(FDA) you can count on the fact that most doctors or hospitals won't know a thing about them.
There is no patent protection for herbs and alternative medicines, which means that drug com-
panies cannot secure a twenty-year monopoly (granted by owning the rights to a new patent) on
these types of products, and their prices remain low and affordable. No patent protection also
means there is not enough profit motive for manufacturers to sponsor expensive clinical trials
to obtain FDA approval for herbs and non-patentable alternatives, and none of the “big
pharma” retail outlets will stock them.
For detailed information on this topic, including important practical information on how
one might fend off antibiotic-resistant bacteria and viruses, see chapter 6 , “Staying Healthy in a
Crisis or Pandemic.”
Scenario 2: Widespread Grid Blackout Due to EMP, Solar Storm, or Terrorist
Act
“ A globalized world is extremely dependent upon electronic communications to operate banking,
communications, health care, computers, transportation systems, and a massive electric grid serving
billions of people. A super solar flare on the scale of the one in 1859 could shut down modernity for
days, weeks, perhaps months depending on the size of the white solar flare eruption from within a
sunspot. One could equate such a possible episode as a Cosmic Katrina-like event on a nearly global
scale happening in say less than twenty-four hours and possibly affecting millions of people. ” —Jack
Kennedy, “Could a Solar Storm Send Us Back to the Stone Age?” Spaceports , August 9, 2010
Imagine that you wake up one morning and your alarm does not go off. You try to turn on the
lights, and they don't work either. You try to make a call on your iPhone or Blackberry, and
find that the circuits are all tied up by millions of other Americans trying to use their portable
battery-powered devices to access the Internet, and make long-distance calls, in their efforts to
find some shred of information about what is going on. If you planned ahead, you have a hand-
crank emergency radio that can access shortwave as well as standard radio channels.
After you have exhausted other alternatives, you dig out your emergency radio, crank it up,
and search the channels for information. Incredibly you find that most of the local channels are
either dead or broadcasting a monotonous, irritating emergency signal tone, and the few that
are actually on the air using their backup batteries and generators have no clue as to what is go-
ing on. Switching bands on your radio, you start scanning the shortwave frequencies. Most of
the broadcasts are in foreign languages, but eventually you come across a few in English. From
listening to the broadcasts and shortwave radio discussions from people in faraway lands, it be-