10:36 – More kit stuff today, although things are slowing down, as they always do this time of year. We’ll have a couple of quiet months before things start to ramp up again for the Christmas season and the start of the new semester in January.
Autumn is definitely starting to arrive up here in the mountains. The leaves are gradually starting to change and fall, and the nighttime lows are into the low 50’s F (~11C). Mornings are usually quite foggy.
As I’m re-ordering inventory for science kits, it again strikes me how useful many of these items are in a prepping sense. Antibiotics and heirloom seeds for biology kits, raw chemicals that can also be used for everything from making up oral rehydration salts to 131 mg/mL potassium iodide solution, bottles and plastic bags by the thousands, and so on. I’d actually considered making up kits of useful items like ORS components, KI solution, etc., but we’re not certified by the FDA for packaging items for human consumption. I suppose I could offer items for educational laboratory use only (wink-wink), but it seems simpler just to tell people what to order themselves. Most of it is available in reasonably small quantities on Amazon.com, such as this, this, this, this, and, for radiation emergencies, even this.
Or you could simply buy ORS packets, although they’ll cost you about a buck per liter versus a small fraction of that for making them up yourself, and KI tablets, although again those’ll cost you about $0.50 per dose versus about $0.02 per dose just buying 100 grams of KI.
Which brings up the issue of how many doses of different things you need to stock. If you need ORS, you need it badly, and a course of treatment for one person can require 20 to 50 liters, or more. I do keep a 15-pack of the commercial ORS on hand, but those are for if we need it RIGHT NOW. In terms of raw materials for ORS, our inventory varies, but all of the components are also science-kit inventory items, so we typically have 1,000+ liters’ worth on hand. KI is also a science kit inventory item, so we generally have at least 8,000 to 10,000 doses on hand. The latter would obviously be excessive if we weren’t stocking it mainly for science kits, but the former is actually a reasonable level, enough for 20 to 50 courses of treatment.