Today: alcohol wipes and things to take the grease off.

Everyone has band-aids in their First Aid Kit(FAK). Lots of people have butterfly strips or steri-strips for closing minor lacerations. Most everyone is planning on using tape or Kerlix, or similar products, to hold on gauze pads. The bad news: If you can't get the skin clean all those materials are going to fall off. They might be useless. I have seen Kerlix and other co-adhesive stretch wraps slide down a limb when the skin was oily.

But you have alcohol wipes you say. This isn't an issue. Really? How many do you have on hand? Given someone who hasn't bathed in a day, or five, skin that is coated with human grease, fat and oil from cooking, sunscreen, body lotion, mud, and crud your going to need a lot of this sort of thing if you want any adhesives to stick.

Given volume use how long are your skin cleaning supplies going to last? There is always soap and water. It is perhaps the best cleaning agent we have. But accidents don't always happen near municipal water. Away from water on tap I have used two or three of the small single-use swabs, commonly used for sterilizing the skin for a shot, to get a single band-aid to stick.

Most FAKs I have seen have only a half dozen of those alcohol swabs. Some commercial kits only three. You might be able to press hand sanitizer into service and use gauze, or your tee shirt, to scrub the grease and crud off. But don't count on it if it is one of the hand sanitizers with moisturizer in it. Nothing sticks to skin coated with moisturizer. The dry-touch moisturizers are even worse. They are like Teflon for skin.

Look critically at your FAK and what you have on hand. A large number of the single-use alcohol swabs might work, especially if they are not the smallest ones. Larger single-use swabs are better than the smallest. A bandanna wet with water from a canteen can remove a good bit of the worse of the crud. Moist towelettes can be good if they don't contain a moisturizer. Baby wipes might work but most of them have moisturizers or aloe in them and while you might be able to take off the worst of the mud and grease you might need to follow up with alcohol swabs to get down to bare skin that will take an adhesive to best effect.

A small bottle of rubbing alcohol is helpful and can do the work of dozens of the single-use swabs but you need to pack extra gauze or cotton balls to scrub the dirt off and for drying. I prefer gauze over the balls or bulk cotton. A clean bandanna is handy and can be reused after washing. Non-sterile gauze pads, about half the price and 99% of the sterility, work well for cleaning. Keep cleaning in mind when buying hand sanitizer and avoid any with moisturizers, aloe, or heavy perfumes.

Don't run out of cleaning supplies before you run out of dirt. Be generous in your estimates and have more than you need on hand. Both alcohol swabs and alcohol based hand cleaner, without moisturizer, have other uses beside cleaning the area around a wound.

But what happens if you run out of cleaning supplies. Or just don't have time to do the clean thing as well as you might. What then? There are two types of bandage that seem to work pretty well on dirty, greasy skin; triangular bandages and cloth elastic bandages, commonly called Ace bandages. They don't depend on any adhesive and are rough enough to 'bite through' a layer or two of human grease.

If you ever have to bandage a significant wound on someone who has applied any of the popular dry-touch moisturizers or sunscreens a triangular or elastic bandage may be your best bet.

If it is just to get a band-aide to stick I've scrubbed the area roughly several times with an alcohol swab to get he moisturizer off. There is a product, similar to a single-use, foil-wrapped, alcohol swab but wet with acetone. They strip off the dry-touch moisturizers quickly. They also dissolve leftover adhesive from tape, and soften superglue. Consider a short supply of these in your kit. They also take off nail polish so you can observe the nail bed, sometimes a helpful diagnostic clue, and work as fire starters. Used too aggressively they can de-fat the skin and cause it to redden, dry, and peel repeatedly. So use care.