Almost every time the media talk about the Earthquake, Tsunami, Nuclear disaster in Japan.  They mention shortages of food and medicine.  One effect it had was to make me think about my families earthquake preparedness.  I realized that in a major disaster like Katrina or Japan the supply chain for prescription medicines is disrupted and you won’t be able to get prescriptions refilled for weeks.  Yet most of us only have a few weeks supply of most medicine at home.  This could be a big problem.

I propose that people who take medicine that is critical to survival keep a minimum 30 day inventory and have it in a place that they can get to it fast if they need to evacuate.

Hopefully you will never need them.  You’ll need to rotate the stock so that you don’t have stale drugs and to get the extra supply you will probably have to manipulate the pharmacy/health insurance reimbursement system.