Food Safety Report - Lifestyle Tropical Beach Resort & Spa, Puerto Plata Puerto Plata Province

Puerto Plata, 57000 Puerto Plata Province, Dominican Republic

I got food poisoning the last night of my stay. This was on June 14, 2019. I believe I ate some contaminated seafood at the Mexican Restaurant on the resort complex. This Mexican restaurant was in a more remote part of the resort, so I could have gotten sick from some food that was washed in contaminated water in this area. Anyway, on the night I got sick my symptoms were immediate and acute. I was up all night with severe stomach cramps and diarrhea. I was scheduled to fly home the next day, so I took Imodium, and made it home. Once home, after the Imodium wore off, my symptoms returned. I continued to have acute diarrhea 2-3 times after every meal, and I experienced diarrhea all night long. Initially, my doctor treated me with antibiotics for travelers sickness, but the symptoms returned after I finished the course of antibiotics. The dysentery continued until I lost ten pounds, and began to black out. I now suffer from chronic dysentery. I’m under the care of a GI specialist, who is helping me to determine what caused the sickness, and to recover my health. Along with the chronic dysentery, I suffer from joint aches, severe fatigue, dry mouth, thirst, and dizziness. I am not the only person who got sick at this resort. The night I fell ill, I met a woman who’d gotten so acutely ill that the resort staff put her in an ambulatory vehicle they called a “hospital” to administer fluids and antibiotics to her. She said they made her lie in this “hospital” for 3 days so she could be recovered enough to be flown home. In general, the sanitation conditions of this place were sketchy. My room was dirty when I arrived; the sheets on the beds had not been changed, the air conditioner leaked, and there was a hole in the wall. The bottled water provided for us clearly came from the resort’s own tap water system because many of the lids had been tampered with. I don’t know how sanitary this water was, or how close it was to the sewage system. Many of the guests were told not to flush used toilet paper down the toilets because the plumbing was not working. In fact, there was rarely any hot water in the rooms, and our toilet broke on a regular basis. So, it is likely that a lot of fecal matter was not being properly disposed of at this resort. All I know is that I have been sick since I stayed at this place, and I have had to shell out thousands of dollars for tests and GI doctors. I read up on the safety precautions before traveling in the DR. While there, I was careful not to drink the tap water, and I only ate fruit with rind on it, like melons and pineapple. I mainly stuck to hot beverages when not drinking the bottled water. I thought I’d be okay eating the prepared meals in the resort’s restaurants because this is supposed to be a “luxury” resort, but apparently not. I still got very sick, and I remain sick, because I stayed at this place, and ate at its restaurants. | Symptoms: Diarrhea, Nausea, Dizziness, Fatigue, Body Ache, Cramps