Practical Doomsday

9 Staying Alive

In Chapter 2, we considered the surprisingly high odds of suffering serious injury due to falls, burns, accidental poisonings, and other seemingly prosaic mishaps that tend to happen around the home. Now, with some other preparedness topics out of the way, it’s time to revisit this topic in more detail—and see if such hazards can be reduced without sapping all the joy out of life.

Of course, given the constant barrage of dreary headlines about cribs-o’-death, brain-eating bacteria, and dog toys laced with industrial toxins, there’s little to be gained by stoking the flames of vague existential dread. We need a way to cut ...