Disaster Preparedness Month, night 26: Packing prescriptions

| Health | Preparedness | Safety | West Seattle news

After our Monday night Disaster Preparedness Month mention, a comment from “Onceachef” pointed out that if you need prescription medication to stay healthy, you need to make sure you have a supply ready to go if you have to evacuate. The federal government has plans to get drugs into disaster-affected zones – read about them here – but the whole point of personal preparedness is the expectation that authorities will not be mobilized to help immediately, so you have to be able to take care of yourself for at least several days. The general advice is that you keep the stockpile in your preparedness kit, and rotate it, rather than just packing it and forgetting about it. What if you need insulin, which is supposed to be kept refrigerated? Here’s a federal infosheet on that. … Got a preparedness question we haven’t addressed, as we get to the final few days of Disaster Preparedness Month? Leave a comment, e-mail us, or take your question, any time, to the West Seattle Be Prepared group on Facebook – where others interested in the topic will help you find the answer!

CeeBee April 27, 2010 (9:47 am)

One way to accumulate enough medicine to have a supply for your kit is to ask your doctor for some samples of your medication. Then use those as the extras for your kit, always remembering to rotate your supplies to keep medications within expiration dates.

Sue April 27, 2010 (1:11 pm)

Someone was just telling me that she puts her medication in one of those 7-day compartment containers, and then has an identical one in the emergency kit. Each week she takes the one from the e-kit to use, and puts a fresh container in the e-kit. That sounded like a great way to rotate medication.