Tips and Tricks to Buy

We created #BuyWisely to help clients buy the right products for the right purpose. With Covid19 hitting us all of a sudden, there was a lot of misinformation circulating. To ensure that people get the right product for their needs and don’t get misinformed by brokers that entered that space, we decided to create informative articles and social media posts. Let us know if you have questions or if you want us to write about a particular topic.

Medical or civil mask?

Which one to choose? Well, it depends on the protection you need.

Civil masks offer adequate protection against dust and microparticles of water but can’t be used as sufficient protection against bacterias and viruses.

The medical masks are meant to protect the doctor or the nurse from catching any diseases, bacterias, and viruses that patients may carry.

Therefore, if you wish to protect yourself from bacteria or viruses, it is advisable to use the medical 3ply. If you know or suspect you will contact an individual with any contagious diseases, a 3 ply medical mask would be advisable.

Plastic or Spunbound?

Antibacterial or waterproof? What to choose?
Plastic always seems to be the best option as it is waterproof but not against bacteria or viruses. Against the body, plastic helps building a layer of warmth that most parasite appreciate.
 
On the other hand, spunbond offers a limited protection against fluid but it is more efficient against bacteria, and viruses. This material is specially made to kill them as soon as they touch the material and is more breathable keeping the body cooler.
 
In brief, spunbond protective equipment is ideal to be worn for a long time in a potentially infected area by bacteria or viruses. The plastic protective equipment is ideal to be worn for a short period of time where you might be in contact with fluids and bacteria.
plastic/spunbond

Sterile or Medical?

Sterile is always the best right? No
 
For personal protective equipment, unless you work in a laboratory or perform surgery, you don’t need sterile equipment.
 
Sterile PPE is used to ensure that no particles other than the ones that the environment is interacting with are present in the room to avoid compromised results or potential infections. Sterile equipment usually is spunbond, plastic, cotton, or metal that has been in a sterile solution for 3 days and sealed in a package that has gone through the same process. This is a fundamental process to ensure all medical equipment that doctors, nurses, tattoo artists, etc., use do not carry any risk of contamination.
 
Therefore, this equipment is more costly, and sterile personal protective equipment is not meant to protect civilians from bacteria and viruses but to make sure that nothing else can combat or interact with them. Which is not what we are looking for, right?
 
This only applies to personal protective equipment and not to medical equipment. Medical devices and medical equipment must always be sterile or sterilized before use.
 
If you are uncertain if you need sterile or medical equipment, seek the advice of a medical practitioner or  contact us.

Latex or Nitrile?

Latex was used at large a few years back, but many medical companies and hospitals switch to nitrile. Not because nitrile is better quality, but because allergies to latex became more common. Instead of picking and choosing the type of gloves to use for each patient, it became easier to use the allergen-free alternative.
 
Due to covid, the price of nitrile gloves has skyrocketed. If you and the people around you are not allergic to latex, you can go that route as it is much cheaper. If you are not sure, it is better to be safe than sorry; nitrile will be the safest alternative.
Latex or Nitrile

Thoat or Nasal Swabs?

Have you ever wonder why the Covid test a more often perform with a nasal swab than a throat swab?
 
The answer is straightforward. Despite that the test uncomfortable, not to say insupportable, nurses keep testing patients with the nasal swabs if they can as the results or more accurate this way.
 
Why? Because of the cycle of the virus. The virus being airborne is most likely to enter your nasal cavity first, which will be reflecting after one or 2 days of infections in a nasal covid test. On the other hand, it takes from 4 to 5 days for the virus to reach the throat, whereby then the symptoms of Covid will be showing up more intensively.
 
To avoid false negatives, covid tests are more often done with nasal swabs. Before doing a covid test, whether it is a rapid test or not, make sure they are using nasal swabs to have results as accurate as possible.

Antibody or Antigen Test?

Why can’t we have a blood Covid test instead of this uncomfortable nasal test? Well, we can, it is just not as accurate, and in a pandemic, accuracy is essential.
 
The blood test is testing the antibody that are developed to fight the virus, and those are developed only after few days of being infectious. Depending on the antigen test used, the virus can detected straight away as it travels through the respiratory system.
 
Like any disease, the antibody can show up on a test even after being cured of the virus.
 
Blood Pressure Monitor

Blood Pressure

Do you know that 1.13 billion people suffer from hypertension?

If you have a blood pressure machine at home, you can track your pressure like people track their diabetes regularly and advised decisions every day for your health.

First of all, hypotension, low blood pressure, and high blood pressure, hypertension are opposite but are monitored the same way. Where hypertension can be regulated at home, hypotension needs medical advice as it can sign underlying conditions that require different treatments. Therefore there are no general guidelines to prevent it.

On the other hand, high blood pressure is normally caused by an excess of fat, meat, sugar, and salt that lead to that condition. If your blood pressure was caused by something else, like medication, smaller veins, or any other diseases, seek the advice of a medical practitioner.

The easiest way to lower high blood pressure on a regular bassist is to include the following fruits and vegetables in your meals: Fruits such as bananas, melons, avocadoes, and apricots, green leafy vegetables such as spinach and kale, vegetables such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, eggplant and tomatoes, tuna and salmon, beans, nuts, and seeds.

If you need to lower your blood pressure quickly, the easiest way is to eat home-cooked vegetarian meals and replace sugar with fresh fruits for a week! Studies have shown that vegetarians have 40% less likely to get high blood pressure than people eating meat, and vegans are 33% less at risk of getting high blood pressure than vegetarians.

I am not saying that if you have to become vegetarian, but lowering the amount of red meat or eating vegetarian once in a while will help you improve your condition.