Water

[jontte]

tha's totally okay,that denial part is something I have come to "understand" that it's here,we have come so far from death,that it's hard for some to
accept the fact that you die,seen it with relatives when working at hospitals.

even if I have ample resources of water here,I try to conserve as much as I can.
those water filters are on my must have more list,though I have means to make a makeshift one too.

 

[Brent S]

I agree.

If it was up to me, cremation would be universal...with a few exception like donating the body to science, or cryonics where the person is frozen.

For me, I would rather have my survivors donate money to cancer research in my name rather than an ostentatious funeral with an expensive headstone.

Agreed. I saw a documentary of a cemetery in France that uses an auger bit to dig a hole. They put you in a cardboard tube, no embalming fluids allowed, and bury the tube. In twenty five years they remove the small marker and bury someone else there as most who knew you have moved on as well. Seems ok to me, but still not as efficient as cremation.
I wish the govt would step up and make organ donation mandatory. Once your dead you don’t need them anymore and there are so many people they could help. It seems pretty selfish to me to not be a donor.

 

[Brent S]

I always thought the embalming was just so the body could remain decent looking long enough for the family to gather and have an open casket funeral. In the south during the summer a body would start to decay pretty quickly without it. Who in the world would embalm someone with a closed casket?

 

[Brent S]

Boy, did we get off topic here!

 

[jontte]

have a donor card in my wallet,so if somebody needs something from me that's still useful,just take it.

 

[jontte]

Brent,it happens to us all sometimes...

 

[jontte]

a quickly made filter.

 

[Brent S]

have a donor card in my wallet,so if somebody needs something from me that's still useful,just take it.

I’m not sure anyone would really be able to use much of whatever’s left from me, but there welcome to it. Even if some med students were able to learn something by cutting me in little pieces at least something positive happens. Burying a body only makes sense to me as it reduces the risk of disease transmission. Cremation is still way better at it.

 

[Kevin L]

Agreed. I saw a documentary of a cemetery in France that uses an auger bit to dig a hole. They put you in a cardboard tube, no embalming fluids allowed, and bury the tube. In twenty five years they remove the small marker and bury someone else there as most who knew you have moved on as well. Seems ok to me, but still not as efficient as cremation.
I wish the govt would step up and make organ donation mandatory. Once your dead you don’t need them anymore and there are so many people they could help. It seems pretty selfish to me to not be a donor.

I agree with your donation ideas in principle, but there are other barriers.

African Americans have, traditionally, been against organ donation because of erronious beliefs that doctors won't work as hard to preserve life in an emergency if donation is in the cards...because black lives don't matter as much as white lives, and black people are a conveinent source of transplant material.

Believe it or not, these beliefs actually have a basis in fact.

If you've heard about the Birmingham church bombing in the early sixties that killed 4 adolescent girls and sparked off the civil rights movement, well, there's an interesting coda to the story.

The graveyard where the girls were buried was moved in the 1990s to make room for a shopping center, and the casket of one of the girls was empty...and her body was stolen.

Medical schools routinely purchased bodies of african americans without the consent or knowledge of the surviving family. It was common.

The military also did this so they could test weapons like landmines, mortars, and new types of grenades.

If you don't believe me, look it up.

 

[Brent S]

I agree with your donation ideas in principle, but there are other barriers.

African Americans have, traditionally, been against organ donation because of erronious beliefs that doctors won't work as hard to preserve life in an emergency if donation is in the cards...because black lives don't matter as much as white lives, and black people are a conveinent source of transplant material.

Believe it or not, these beliefs actually have a basis in fact.

If you've heard about the Birmingham church bombing in the early sixties that killed 4 adolescent girls and sparked off the civil rights movement, well, there's an interesting coda to the story.

The graveyard where the girls were buried was moved in the 1990s to make room for a shopping center, and the casket of one of the girls was empty...and her body was stolen.

Medical schools routinely purchased bodies of african americans without the consent or knowledge of the surviving family. It was common.

The military also did this so they could test weapons like landmines, mortars, and new types of grenades.

If you don't believe me, look it up.

Our govt has done a lot of questionable and just flat out wrong things over the years in the guise of ‘national interests’. Unfortunately I am sure they will continue in one form or another. I’m not much on conspiracy theories, but the govt is run by people, and people are capable of really bad things.
Oprah just did a movie about a black woman who was an unusual match for cancer research. They used her tissues for decades in medical research, all without consent from her or the family.

 

[Kevin L]

Our govt has done a lot of questionable and just flat out wrong things over the years in the guise of ‘national interests’. Unfortunately I am sure they will continue in one form or another. I’m not much on conspiracy theories, but the govt is run by people, and people are capable of really bad things.
Oprah just did a movie about a black woman who was an unusual match for cancer research. They used her tissues for decades in medical research, all without consent from her or the family.

You're talking about a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died from an aggressive cervical cancer in the 1950s.

I heard about the body story that I just relayed in a book about Henrietta Lacks that was written by Rebecca Skloot.

Doctors took her cancer cells without her knowledge or consent, and actually turned them into a multibillion dollar industry.

Her cancer cells made the polio vaccine a reality, and were invaluable in studying and understanding HIV.

In the meantime, researchers lied to the family about tests so that they could get more cells from her descendants in order to compare the genes, and see how things changed over time.

All the while the family is living in poverty with no clue as to what's going on.

 

[Proud Prepper]

Well they know now. What is being done for them now?

 

[Brent S]

I guess I have to see the movie

 

[Kevin L]

I guess I have to see the movie

They have been fighting a lot of things in court.

A few of them are crackheads, others are unemployed.

They have been lied to as recently as the 90s with regards as to why doctors were taking blood samples.

To give you an idea of how often HeLa cells (her cancer cells) were used in research...imagine gathering them all into one mass.

This mass would be bigger than the Empire State Building.

They've used her cells to refine the rabies vaccine, to find a polio vaccine, to cultivate the AIDS virus, to create human cancers in animals, to test and refine chemotherapy drugs, and so on.

Her cells have, literally, saved millions and millions of lives.

The family was kept in the dark, and they donated blood samples to doctors who lied about why they were taking them.

If you want to read about it, look for a book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It's well worth a read, and isn't the dry, academic stuff that you might expect.