Welcome to AltPPE.net!
This site is here to feature links and information on personal protective equipment for people with special needs and styles.
Viruses are not political, but politics can certainly lead to problems. We all know about the struggle between maskers and anti maskers. Well, the whole reason that debate exists at all is because, as my parents taught me, half the truth is as bad as a lie, and the people have been told many half truths about viruses.
When scientists and doctors write about or discuss these things, they often forget that most of us out here are not their colleagues. We are their patients. Sometimes too much information or too specific information is not as helpful as giving simple truths that people can actually use.
My grandmother, Sis. Janie Simpson, was a practical nurse, and when I was a kid, she and my mom taught me hygiene that kept me relatively safe throughout my years of school and being a military brat. I technically should have been a sickly child. I was skinny and had very little appetite. Yet I was not sick very often because of following basic rules.
My grandma took care of people of various ages and levels of physical ability. She helped people struggling with many different conditions and diseases. She got those of us she loved through some rough times. So in this website, I’m applying some of her wisdom to make it easier for people to deal with the latest famous microbial crisis.
Strangely, for some reason, most informative sites approach the issue as if the default person is (“white” and) young with few or no health problems. This is not the real world. Most people have something going on, and half the world more or less menstruates. When people are pleading for the use of barriers and hygiene for the sake of the immune compromised, that is almost everyone on the planet at one point or another. This is just the tip of the iceberg of hard truth that needs to be addressed though.
I’ll continue this introduction with more hard truth: many deadly pandemics have already come and gone over the years. Within the past few decades, if you’re reading this, you’ve survived at least one, probably two major ones. The only reason you didn’t know the reason people were dying around you before is because very few were getting tested. Doctors knew and the government knew, but they didn’t tell us because they didn’t want us to panic.
The only reason Covid-19 wasn’t treated the same as the last SARS that went around 10-12 years ago is because it was discovered early on in a city in China that is well known for its ubiquitous 5G technology. Because people’s activities could be so easily tracked, and the Chinese government has so much motivation to control things, but they learn from the past, this time they understood the best way to get things under control is to inform the people.
So this time, because China wasn’t hiding anything, others couldn’t hide it as easily, though some have tried.
In any case, Covid-19 is not the first deadly pandemic in our lifetimes, and will not be the last. In order to survive these things, we have to get out of our egos and just do what needs to be done.
For the same reason we use condoms and other barriers to protect each other from HIV and other STD’s, and wear flip flops in gym showers, we should use masks and alternative barriers to protect each other from whatever virus or hey, bacterial disease. It’s just common sense.
I’ve built this site to help make barriers and good hygiene easier.
Blessings and Ashé!
Sis. Nicole T. N. Lasher
