Skin infections and BJJ are just a fact of life (I may do a blog entry on them later). I don't care how clean you keep the mats at your gym. Thirty minutes into a hard class and there's sweat, blood, spit, and scraped skin somewhere on them. It helps to keep your gear clean, shower immediately after each class, and always try to keep the mats clean of course . . . but sometimes infection is unavoidable.
Diseases in grapping come in three basic forms: Bacterial (including MRSA, regular staph, impetago, etc), Fungal (ringworm), and Viral (herpes). Defense soap claims to work against all three on their website. The big question of course, is does it work? Defense soap is expensive to buy (6 - 7$ per bar) and pretty hard to find in local stores. I found out that it's much cheaper to buy if you get several bars . . . so I'm the proud new owner of 12 bars of defense soap.
First impressions . . . well, it looks like soap. Kinda has a medicinal stinky sort of smell that's not awful but not really awesome either. Lathers up pretty well, and seems like it's a little less drying to the skin than the Dial antibacterial soap that I had been using. So far I've used it after one class. This is where the 'ongoing effort' comes in. Every couple months I'll update this article to let people know if I've caught anything or noticed anything different about the soap. Just to have some full disclosure here . . . I use KS Skin Cream, wash my gear immediately after every class, and shower before going home after each training session. (You would think that that alone would keep me from getting infections . . . sigh. Why does this awesome sport have to be so gross sometimes?)
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