Blood and small cuts.

It's common sense for a large cut or any signifigant bleeding to be taken care of. What about small cuts, such as the ones a person gets while shaving? I've often found blood on the arm portions of my gi. At first I thought no big deal because it poses no high risk to my self. I soon realized that I use the arm portions of my gi to wipe the sweat off my face every couple of minutes and that during most techniques I'm brining classmates faces to my arms during practise. Now I know HIV transmission is low, especially since its small dots that dry quickly on absorbent thick cotton but viruses like HBV can live for 8 days on dry surfaces!....

so what i'm asking i guess is....what would you do if you noticed your partner had a small insignifigant cut that only bled drops?! Would you totally stop practising? Would you keep going putting people faces against your blood splatterd gi?!

I dont want to seem like a complete wuss to my sensei or a hypocrite cause I my self have bled on the mat...but after reading some of the articles on this great website i'm starting to rethink a couple of things..

I'm sure common sense would prevail....and always make sure you have assorted shape bandaids handy...

It'd be a good idea to bring a towel(even a hand one) to wipe off sweat as well.

I'm not sure how worried we should be about this. I used to get tickled when they would break out the hydrogen peroxide and chase down all the little blood spots on the mat. However, I've been doing a little research on different things and I've learned that 1-4 or 5 people have genital herpes, I don't know if this is something you can get from blood or not. Also, wrestlers can get a form of herpes on their skin, I didn't know that either until I researched this more. So, what to do? I don't know either.

Biohazard suits make for interesting training sessions.

As a precaution for myself and other as soon as I find a small cut no matter the size. I excuse myself from the training session and clean it up and put a band-aid on it and jump right back it. A little cut can after a minute rip or just keep oozing out blood. First you can infect others what ever you may have or become too much blood on your face or hand which becomes slippery. Second you can get it infected by others sweat or cause more injury to yourself like I mentioned a small cut can rip more open. So it is up to you to use your judgement and take care of yourself and out of respect to others to clean up yourself.

That probably makes as much sense as anything. Good idea.

I carry a styptic pencil and that "New Skin" or "Liquid Bandage" stuff -- the styptic pencil stops it from bleeding, and the paint-on bandage stuff stays on whereas even "Active Strip" bandages seem to come right off if they're someplace sweaty and exposed. The paint-on stuff stings when you first put it on and it takes a couple minutes to dry.

As for cleaning the dojo, I clean at a karate school where I teach and we always clean up the blood right away. But you can't use any old cleaner -- we had to look pretty hard to find one that kills HIV and athlete's foot and everything else, and all the cleaners that do so have to be left on for 10 minutes to do their job.