I’ve said many times that we can expect delusional beliefs to rise in proportion to the economic hardships we experience. That is exactly what’s happ… - James Howard Kunstler

Even if we can’t get all the tools and the products we currently enjoy, we will retain a lot of basic knowledge that the people of Jefferson’s day just didn’t have. For instance, we will still understand that infections and many diseases are caused by microorganisms, not bad air, phases of the moon, or evil spells, and that knowledge alone confers powerful advantages in daily living.

In the chaotic period around the peak oil event, China will not be without extraordinary problems of its own, starting with enormous population pressures, and moving on to massive environmental degradation and the incubation and spread of epidemic diseases, including deadly influenzas associated with factory farming as well as accelerated AIDS infection […]. The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak was a preview of coming attractions. On top of these vicissitudes will be added the severe economic hardship entailed when an economically strapped America (and the rest of the West) can no longer sop up the many products of China's tremendous industrial capacity. This would produce widespread unemployment in China, …leading to [a] political turmoil of a kind not seen since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Despite miraculous advances in medical technology, genetic typing, and immunology, …[we] are not much better prepared for a severe flu epidemic than… [our ancestors] were for the 1918 outbreak. Epidemic influenza is extremely difficult to counteract. Flu vaccines developed in any given year are notoriously ineffective against new strains that come along the following year. It takes seven months or more to create, test, manufacture, and distribute a vaccine developed in direct response to a new virus, and by that time the disease can burn through global populations. If a pandemic broke out today, hospital facilities would be overwhelmed. Nurses and doctors would be infected along with the rest of the population.