ilovebacteria

I wouldn't put bacteria onto the bandages - the bandages are designed to stop bacteria from growing on a wound and I doubt anything would grow on a normal bandage. Check out the pic below, it shows zones of inhibition on an agar plate caused by disks containing an antibiotic. Your experiment would work the best if you try something like this. You would need to spread bacteria over an entire plate and place small pieces of your bandages face down on top. Then let the bacteria grow and then measure the zone of inhibition - this is the area where bacteria haven't been able to grow on the plate. Try with lots of pieces of bandage and work out an average, then compare to other makes of bandage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Staphylococcus_aureus_%28AB_Test%29.jpg

The thing with bacteria is that you can't really think of them in terms of individual cells. An antibiotic might be able to kill 99.99% of a population of bacteria, yet if one survives it can proliferate and be back to its original numbers in no time! So any sick cells just die and no one notices.