durhamregion.com | This Week | Thursday, October 27, 2022 | 8 A Courtice woman described suffering a high fever, facial swelling and hearing loss from an ear infection after visiting the Thermea spa village in Whitby where a saltwater pool was contaminated with staph bacteria. Kaitlin Keefer visited the spa with her mother and sister on Monday Oct. 10. She said she spent six hours there including two 45-minute sessions of floating in the Kalla pool and noted that she and her companions showered before and after floating in the saltwater pool. The next day, Keefer said she was hit with a 103 degree fever -- more than 39 C -- that lasted for three days while her ear started to swell. By the following Thursday the pain in her ear was so great that she couldn't close her teeth together and by Friday she had a mass on her face where her ear met her cheek. "It was so swollen I couldn't see my ear when I looked in the mirror." Keefer attended urgent care where the doctor initially thought she had a sinus infection, and she was put on a course of antibiotics. Both her mother and sister also suffered ear infections and blisters on their bodies with her sister also experiencing foot swelling. "I have really bad hearing loss right now where I can't hear out of my left ear at all and my right ear, I'd say, is about 50 per cent functioning. The Courtice resident didn't hear about a problem with the Kalla pool until it was reported in the media on Oct. 18, it was then that she found out that the health department had shut the pool down on Oct. 14. She contacted Thermea about her illness and heard nothing back and shared her experience in a widely shared Facebook post. Then on the evening of Oct. 19 she received an email from the Groupe Nordik CEO Martin Pacquette stating that Durham Region health department had found pseudomonas and staphylococcus bacteria in the Kalla salt-water pool. That left Keefer wondering why she wasn't notified as soon as the test results were relayed to the spa. "When the health department shut them down they should have emailed all of us and said what they found so that I was armed with the right information when I went to my doctor because the antibiotics that I was given were not strong enough for what I'm battling right now, so I'm just hoping I don't have permanent hearing damage from this ... I could have told my doctor I floated in a pool with staph bacteria and now my ear has blown up." Keefer knows that she is not alone in feeling ill, saying she had heard from almost 20 people with similar experiences after she shared her Facebook post and she said no one had been acknowledged other than the message from the CEO sent out via email to customers. "Thermea said their focus is on wellness and wellbeing and yet they did not address all of us who are getting sick until several days after the health department shut them down," she said. Amanda McLaren, marketing manager for Thermea Spa, Whitby, did not provide an exact number of impacted spa customers but said that only a small percentage of the hundreds of people who had passed through the spa had reported symptoms. "We do estimate it has only impacted less than one per cent that we know, of course this is a developing situation, but so far it has been a very small minority of guests who have come to us with complaints." McLaren said the test that Durham Health Department conducted takes several days to deliver a result and that results come from a provincial lab. "As soon as we got that, that is when we shut down Kalla and we started launching an investigation on how this impacts our customers." McLaren said the spa spent a couple of days after receiving the test results working with public health and going through complaints before responding to the public and the message from the CEO and owner was intended to show that the entire company was taking the situation seriously. The water quality problem was caused by a failure of the UV and bromine disinfectant caused by a mechanical failure, said McLaren. The other pools were not impacted but they have all been shut down as a precaution as all systems are assessed, she said. In his email, Paquette said in his 20 years of running spas a situation like this had never occurred. "We are devastated to hear this has been your experience of our village," he said. "Please be assured that we took every step we could to ensure the pool was fully inspected, approved and certified by public health authorities, and regularly tested and staffed by experts. The moment we received a suspicious result, the pool was closed, and our investigation began." Customers have been offered a refund on the $59 for the Kalla portion of their visit but McLaren said further restitution may be available to those impacted by illness. "Other guests who feel like they want to have a bigger discussion about this, we're taking it on a case-by-case basis," McLaren said. After the pool closures, the spa remained open with the saunas, steam rooms, rest areas and restaurants open and people who chose to still use the limited facilities would receive a voucher for another visit. "We know that we have some work to do to gain back the trust of all of our guests. We just want to make it very, very clear that we are taking every step to revisit it. This week we're taking it all the way to the top on the level of severity that this is," said McLaren. "Kalla is my personal favourite -- it's the crown jewel of our property and we're going to do everything we can to restore people's faith in that experience." COURTICE WOMAN DESCRIBES ILLNESS FOLLOWING VISIT TO THERMEA SPA REKA SZEKELY rszekely@ durhamregion.com BUSINESS Kaitlin Keefer and her mom, Maggie, attended Whitby's Thermea spa on Oct. 10 and used the Kalla saltwater pool. Both experienced infections following their visit. The Durham health department closed the Kalla pool after finding pseudomonas and staphlococcus bacteria in it. Jason Liebregts/Metroland