This is a petition demanding improvements on the sanitary condition of the mats in the Blue Room at UCLA’s John Wooden Center.


Over the course of its history, the Blue Room has been providing UCLA students, staff, and visitors with invaluable opportunities to enrich their campus lives by housing numerous martial arts classes and events. However, the room has also been known to infect its users with various kinds of skin diseases because its mats have not been cleaned frequently enough. For instance, dermatophytosis, commonly known as “ringworm”, infects at least a few people every quarter. Once infected with this highly contagious skin disease, a person suffers from itchiness of the infected part of the skin and has to stay away from the mats for up to a few months until the skin inflammation goes away. Prevalence of such diseases not only takes away infected individual’s privilege to train, but also jeopardize the health and well-being of all the people who step into the mats.


Whereas we appreciate the opportunity to train in Blue Room, improvements on the sanitary condition of the mats are absolutely necessary for the safety, health, and well-being of everyone who uses them. Therefore we demand:

(1) That the mats in Blue Room be cleaned (swept and mopped with bleach) twice daily, once in the afternoon before the instructional classes start, and once more after the classes end at night.

(2) the key to the room that stores the cleaning equipment be available at all times, so that each club can clean the mats before their assigned practice time if necessary

(3) stricter regulations to be reinforced including the custodians to take off their shoes when cleaning



Thank you so much for taking time to sign the petition. If your health has been compromised because of unsanitary mats in the Blue Room, please take a moment and write a short paragraph explaining what happened to you in the comment section. These personal comments will be a powerful addition to our claim.

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