These companies sold in bulk to hospitals, clinics, cruise ships and the like. Most supplies sold to the ordinary man on the street tended to be those things that the ordinary man on the street didn’t really need. Emergency medical supplies at the retail level were almost exclusively the domain of the adventurer who would be camping in the wilderness or climbing a mountain. How times have changed. The list of items that you can find listed under the all-encompassing umbrella of emergency medical supplies now include such specific items as an avian flu protection kit. We’ve come a long way from a snakebite kit and bandages for the weekend hiker. But perhaps we haven’t evolved so far from the 1950s.

One of the boom businesses back then was the bomb shelter industry. Just as someone might knock on your door trying to sell you aluminum siding today, it wasn’t unusual for a door-to-door salesman to try to sell your grandparents a hiding place from a nuclear warhead. While it may seem silly today, is it really all the different from internet sites selling gas masks.

There’s nothing wrong with being prepared. And certainly it doesn’t hurt to have as well stocked a collection of emergency medical supplies on hand as you can afford. But it also doesn’t hurt to step back and take a little time for reflection before purchasing supplies that you may be buying strictly out of an irrational fear. Americans are living under a looming shadow of a terrorist threat and that has—cynical or not—spurred thousands of people to start up companies that aim to quickly cash in on that fear.

The truth is, however, that America faces far more dangerous threats than terrorism. If you really want to protect yourself by arming yourself with emergency medical supplies, then hold back on buying that gas mask until after you’ve bought some batteries for your fire alarm, or until after you’ve replaced your old lead pipes or upgraded your old PVC pipes. There are a lot of medical dangers facing you today. But just because you saw a TV report on somebody dying from Avian flu in China doesn’t mean you need to immediately go out and stock up on emergency medical supplies that will keep you safe from it.