Tai Home Spa Addresses MRSA Infection Issue

October 15, 2013

The Tai Home Spa — the spa at the centre of the recent MRSA issue — said they cooperated fully with the Health Department, and apologised to all their customers. The Laffan Street spa also said they will reimburse the cost of a spa treatment to any clients who were victims of the MRSA infection linked to the spa.

Tai Home Spa owner Juan Smith emphasized that the Spa had “done everything it had been asked” by the Health Ministry after learning about the problem and had immediately closed the Laffan Street, Pembroke facility after learning of the problem.

The Department of Health confirmed the Spa’s full cooperation and has also stated: “To date there is no evidence of ongoing/secondary transmission from those linked to the spa.

“The risk of MRSA contraction at the implicated spa can be considered similar to the risk level at any spa as it is an industry risk. Any facility where there is close contact, bathing or undressing would hold a similar risk.”

Mr Smith said Tai Home Spa had been contacted by the Health Ministry after the cases were linked to the spa and the owners and staff had fully cooperated in testing the water supply and all of the employees.

The facility was also thoroughly cleaned with recommended MRSA disinfectant Accel after being closed.

“We cleaned every surface and bottle and washed all of the linen and beds. Basically, we broke the entire facility down and cleaned everything. After that, we cleaned everything again with the disinfectant to be 100 percent certain we had eliminated it,” said Mr Smith.

After the cleaning, the Department of Health carried out more testing and gave the spa permission to re-open.

All staff were also tested for MRSA and when one employee was identified as being a carrier, that person was put on medical leave and prescribed medication two weeks ago.

After one week the person was tested again and was found to be clean. As an extra precaution, the staff member remains on sick leave and shall be tested again later this week. Results of that test are expected soon thereafter.

The staff member showed no symptoms of MRSA, Mr Smith said. “The Health Department told us as many as one in three people with the condition can be a carrier and have no idea.”

Mr Smith said the Spa had followed all of the instructions of the Department of Health in terms of cleaning the facility and isolating the affected staff member.

“We opened up our client register to the Department and they said they would contact everyone who needed to be contacted. If we received any inquiries, we were told to refer them to the Department of Health.

“We want to apologise to all of our customers for this episode and to thank all of the people who have reached out to us to offer support,” Mr Smith said. “We also want to offer our sympathy to other spas who may have been affected by the Government’s policy of not disclosing our name and we regret some of the comments that have been made in social media.

“Without in any way lessening the seriousness of MRSA, we note that this is a very common throughout the world and there have been more than 100 cases in Bermuda this year and last year, and we hope that this episode, at the very least, will raise public awareness about this problem.

“We want them to know that our facility is 100 percent free of the MRSA and we now have a regular preventative maintenance programme in place which will see in addition to daily spa cleaning every bathroom cleaned with the anti-MRSA disinfectant once a week and every treatment room thorough disinfectant once a month.”

Staff will also be required to take quarterly tests for MRSA.

“We always put the health and safety of our clients and staff first and our actions in this case demonstrate that,” Mr Smith said.

Mr Smith said that although the Spa had no way of knowing about the infection, it had decided to offer compensation to anyone who could show they contracted the MRSA infection from the spa.

“Anyone who can show they contracted the MRSA infection from the spa will receive a refund for their original spa treatment and the spa will also give them a free spa treatment,” he said

Located at Laffan Street, Hamilton, Tai Home Spa’s professional  team provides a wide range of spa therapies from Thai, Balinese, deep tissue, Chinese, 4 hand massages to manicure, pedicures, waxing and different types of facial and body treatments.

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Comments (21)

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  1. Dave says:

    Good on them.

    Its really not that serious either. The same nasty mother f—rs who went there with open wounds and contracted it are just as nasty as the infected one who brought it there with his open wound.

    People get scared about anything now.

    Now the owners of the catering company that poisoned half of the MSA teachers back in 2011 should disclose their name, in my opinion, that was far worse.

    • Paul says:

      I agree with you Dave,that catering company should have been disclosed…why all the secrecy ? we the people are the ones who are getting sick !!! the health dept need to be more informative.

    • Natalie says:

      @Dave: So you think all the clients had open wounds? Are you for real? How do we know the worker didn’t scratch these people while doing the massage and infected them that way? You don’t need open wounds to get it. The bacteria can linger on objects such as towels-if someone rubs oneself with an infected towel, it will create abrasions that let the infection in; something as small as that can infect you.

      Don’t be so silly…you think 20 people went in there with open wounds? If they did and the worker still massaged them, then the worker is the nasty one!

    • Natalie says:

      @Dave: Agree about the catering thing, though.

    • I Don't Get It says:

      @Dave, it IS serious…and can be deadly. You sound so ridiculous, people don’t have to have an open sore to get it. You really need to educate yourself before you go talking nonsense!!!

      • Dave says:

        Yeah, so deadly. This is the western side of the world. Dying of this is like dying of cystic acne. Its probably not gonna happen.

        • Seriously? says:

          A quote from a medical website on MRSA related deaths:

          “It appears that more people in the U.S. now die from the mostly hospital-acquired staph infection MRSA than from AIDS, according to a new report from the CDC.

          Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was responsible for an estimated 94,000 life-threatening infections and 18,650 deaths in 2005, CDC researchers report in the Oct. 17 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.”

          Maybe you should get your facts straight Dave!

  2. hmm says:

    I won’t be going there!

  3. Mayan says:

    I feel sorry for Mr. Smith. He’s doing damage control but I don’t think it’s going to work…people just aren’t going to take that chance. Sadly, his business is probably finished.

    • Hazel says:

      I agree with you. Despite coming clean (no pun intended) people most likely would not want to patronize them now. Such a shame!

  4. Y-Gurl says:

    What’s the fascination with Tai anything? These “spas” are popping up like speed bumps on our roads, this joint will lose and open up with another name…damage done!

  5. melonbda says:

    Hope all those who wanted the spa named are happy now they may have put someone hardworking out of business and many out of a job- and no not all ‘foreigners’.
    As for the catering company, so typical of Bermudians, want to pull everyone down who perceived to has too much of a foreign connection … that case as I understood it was not so simple, ‘the catering company’ got food from other companies so it was not clear whose food was tainted … so why name, what purpose does it serve. sad.

    • Pat says:

      Well Melonbda, this puts the entire Spa fraternity under the microscope. I am certainly going to think again before I spend out large sums of cash for any treatments. I agree that this will affect the livelihood of many people but we the public have the right to know of any establishment that has bad health practices that could cause major problems. That is a sad story of the man was laid up in a foreign hospital as a result of this exposure. It is true that KEMH is full of MRSA and the public are swinging through there daily for appointments, visits or just having lunch. We don’t know who is walking around with it. We need to keep our immune systems in top shape so that we can fight these superbugs. As for food handling in Bermuda, if we really took interest in our food preparation, we all would not eat out period. The Health Department needs to raise their standards for all restaurants on the islands and that includes hotels ,

    • Annie says:

      @melonbda: They deserved to be named. The public has a right to know so they can make up their own minds as to whether they should patronize this place or not.

      As for the catering thing, the Health Dept. at the time said that they had to educate the staff on hygiene so clearly it wasn’t just a case of spoiled food. There are some downright nasty people working in the food service industry. Many people think that just because they have on gloves it gives them free reign to do whatever…but you still need to be sanitary with gloves on because germs stick to the gloves just as they do to hands. You can’t pick your nose with gloves on and think it’s o.k. and believe it or not, some people do.

      As for the foreign thing, we have nasty Bermudians but some foreigners from third world countries have very different ideas of hygiene from us. What’s acceptable in a place like India isn’t acceptable here. I was in a restaurant where an Indian staff member went to the restroom which is located near the seating area. I was right outside and he came out without washing his nasty hands and went right back to dishing up people’s food! Even though he used tongs he still had to handle the takeout containers, etc. so whoever got that order had traces of his urine all over their containers. I’ve seen tons of stuff like that in most cases, it involved foreign workers!

  6. Truth is killin' me... says:

    I’ll get my massage at home by my spouse!!!Hahaaa!!!!!!KEEP YOUR MRSA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  7. JONO says:

    Hi, MRSA is a very common bacterial situation…Many healthy persons have it and they are not affected adversely…It is more serious to those with open wounds…..In KEMH most isolations rooms have MRSA positive patients…more than a dozen on each Medical ward and not many less on the surgical wards…KEMH isolate to help control it…US hospitals don’t isolate patients with MRSA. You can get it only by contact with a person who has it…Effective, frequent handwashing is perhaps the best way to stop its spread…

    • Annie says:

      @Jono: MRSA never used to be in Bermuda. It came here from overseas. Either a patient was treated in a hospital overseas and then was treated in our hospital and brought it here, or it came through a staff member recruited from overseas. In any case, it didn’t originate in Bermuda.

      • Family Man says:

        So, kind of like Bermudian themselves then. None of them originated here, they all trace their origins from overseas.

  8. Comment is Free says:

    No one disputes that MRSA is both very common and can be very serious. Tai Home Spa had very little control over this and did everything and more that that they were asked to do.
    As Pat says, KEMH has regular MRSA outbreaks, as does pretty much every hospital in the world and people still go to them.
    Tai Home Spa is probably the safest spa in Bermuda, if not the world now.

  9. Comment is Free says:

    There have been 134 cases of MRSA in Bermuda this year. If 20 were at Tai Home Spa, where were the other 114?

  10. Rubdown says:

    I will not be going there!