A British family struck down by a sickness outbreak at a five-star resort in Greece has been joined by dozens of tourists in demanding a probe after they saw rat droppings on sun loungers and guests vomiting in the pool.

Danielle Faulkner, 44, spent £3,000 on a family holiday to the luxury Apollonian Asterias Resort and Spa on the island of Kefalonia with her two daughters Amelie, 15, and Isobel, 17.

But their first trip together in five years soon turned into a holiday from hell as Ms Faulkner and Amelie experienced sickness and diarrhoea on just the second day of their week-long summer break after arriving on July 16.

Ms Faulkner, who has a suppressed immune system from having the incurable condition lupus, even needed help from one of her daughters after losing consciousness before she was treated by a resort doctor with antibiotics. 

The business change manager from Newport, South Wales, said: ‘The last thing you expect when you book a five-star luxury holiday is for it to be wiped out by illness. I wish we’d never have booked the holiday.

‘We know nothing can turn the clock back and make up for what’s happened, but the least we feel we deserve is answers as to why the holiday turned into a nightmare.’

The action taken by 35 holidaymakers has ignited somewhat of a feud with the resort which defended itself to MailOnline by blaming sunshine-seeking tourists for bringing the virus over to Greece and refusing to isolate in their rooms. 

Three days after Ms Faulkner and Amelie were struck down, Isobel also suffered the same symptoms. The family said that they saw rodent droppings on loungers and guests being sick at dining tables, in the swimming pool and in reception.

‘The holiday quickly went from what we hoped would be a dream trip to a disaster. What’s even more concerning is that we weren’t alone’, Ms Faulkner, who booked her holiday through TUI, added.

‘We saw other holidaymakers being sick in front of the other guests and others were complaining about hygiene standards.’

She added: ‘It was awful. We couldn’t even keep down water down and in 40-degree heat that was incredibly worrying. Amelie said that she’d never been so ill in her life.’ 

Ms Faulkner said that after they fell ill, notices were put up outside the restaurant and pool area telling guests there had been sickness in the luxury resort which features a tennis court, spa, outdoor cinema and health and fitness centre.

She also claimed waiting staff were wearing masks and gloves, which she assumed was a Covid measure; tables weren’t cleaned between guests dining, plates of food were left outside rooms of guests and bags of rubbish were left overnight in corridors.

Ms Faulkner said: ‘After the last few years and what everyone has been through with Covid and because we’ve not been away together as a family for so long, we felt we deserved a break.

‘My daughters have worked incredibly hard at school and have achieved amazing exam results.

‘We’d researched where to go for weeks and looked at various options. We chose the resort as it looked like everything we wanted.

‘We made sacrifices and saved hard for months to enjoy what we thought would be a special holiday on which we’d create memories together.

‘However, the enthusiasm and excitement we had about our holiday quickly vanished.’

Jatinder Paul, the specialist international injury lawyer at Irwin Mitchell who has been instructed by the Faulkners as well as other families to investigate, said: ‘We continue to be contacted by a growing number of people from across the UK who fell ill during holidays to this resort this summer.

‘What’s of particular concern is that multiple families are reporting suffering the same serious symptoms and in a short timeframe. The ages of those affected range from one-year-old to 57.

‘Naturally Danielle, Amelie, Isobel and others we represent, want answers as to how they became so unwell on a five-star holiday.

‘We’re now investigating those concerns to provide them with the answers they deserve.

‘Gastric illness can lead to serious and long-term health complications and its impact should never be downplayed.

‘It’s vital that those with concerns about the resort are now supported.

‘If during our investigations any issues are identified, action needs to be taken to reduce the risk of other holidaymakers falling ill in the future.’

A spokesman for the Apollonian Asterias Resort and Spa denied that the hotel was responsible and blamed tourists for bringing the ‘unprecedented diarrhoea and vomiting outbreak’ to the hotel.

They said that the first cases appeared on July 14 – the day after ‘we had new arrivals mostly from the UK’.

The spokesman told MailOnline: ‘D&V is something that appears during holidays and it is a routine of all hotels to have an odd case so when we had the first cases of course we never thought that this can turn out to be an outbreak.

‘Then, we did not know much. For example we did not know that the UK government had announced an increase of D&V cases and norovirus at the British Schools back in March.

‘Little did we know then that there has been and increase of norovirus and this was travelling around the world. Unfortunately we found out the hard way.

‘People need to blame always somebody. This was proven not to be caused by the hotel or because we did not do something correctly.

‘This virus was brought to us by travellers. Being a big resort with many restaurants cross-contamination was quick.’

They continued: ‘We asked that guests being ill to stay in their rooms, nevertheless many would not listen and actually decided to go to the pools.’

In June, MailOnline revealed that a widower whose wife died after she fell ill during their dream holiday to a five-star resort in Cape Verde was one of 350 guests taking legal action against TUI.

Jane Pressley, from Gainsborough, travelled to the Riu Palace Hotel in Santa Maria with her husband Michael for a two-week holiday to celebrate her birthday in November last year.

Two days into her stay, the mother-of-two, who was also due to become a grandmother for the first time, fell ill with gastric and flu-like symptoms including vomiting and diarrhoea. 

After she returned home, Jane’s illness worsened and she was admitted to hospital, where she died in January. ‘While nothing will ever bring her back,’ her husband said, ‘we need some answers. It’s the least we deserve.’ 

A TUI spokesman said in a statement at the time: ‘Our thoughts and sympathies remain with the Pressley family. As this is now a legal matter, it would not be appropriate for us to comment further.’ 

In relation to Ms Faulkner’s holiday, a TUI spokesman said: ‘We are sorry to hear about these experiences as the health and safety of our customers is our biggest priority.

‘Unfortunately, as this is now a legal matter, we are unable to comment any further.’

FOOD

THE FOOD ADVENTURERS 

by Daniel E. Bender (Reaktion Books £20, 352pp)

When I lived in France and my parents-in-law came to visit from Wyre Piddle in Worcestershire, they would fill their car with trusted groceries — Robertsons jelly, Bird’s custard, Heinz ketchup, Branston pickle, sliced white bread and Cheddar cheese.

They weren’t going to risk any fancy foreign muck, like garlic or olive oil.

Daniel Bender, a professor of food studies in Toronto, suggests people are quite right to be nervous of new eating experiences, especially the ‘fiery torments’ of curries and spices, which can burn the mouth ‘like a live coal’ and ’cause tears to flow’. Exactly. The most intense pain I ever endured was in Borneo, when I chewed what I thought was a humble broad bean. It was a chilli.

Who really wants to go all the way to Australia for kangaroo tail stew, or to Bali for minced sea turtle? And it’s never a good idea to drink the water. Typically, ‘worms of various kinds invaded the lymph, circulatory and urinary systems. All from a glass of water carelessly consumed’.

In 1923, the American Centre for Disease Control and Prevention told travellers to expect ‘diarrhoea, nausea and fever’, and people were informed not to be surprised if most places overseas served meals which were ‘unwholesome, dirty, smelly, inedible and contaminated’.

Nevertheless, there have always been hardy souls who positively enjoy tracking down bizarre lunches and dinners, e.g. Anthony Bourdain, who in 2013 swallowed a beating cobra heart in Vietnam.

Bender finds accounts of 18th- and 19th-century travellers who cheerfully tucked into ‘mouldy fish and eggs ready to hatch into chicks’. In Canton (now Guangzhou), people have eaten ‘hashed dog, sinews of whale and rat croquettes’. As Bender argues, though tourists always say they intend ‘to seek out restaurants and food stalls where locals eat’, in practice they prefer to rely on guide-book recommendations, and enter premises where health and safety inspections have been carried out.

Thomas Cook, Cunard, the Hilton hotel chain and other holiday businesses have developed a successful formula, in effect moving passengers from their home environment to foreign parts, while keeping them in isolation. When I went on a Saga cruise up the Amazon with Maureen Lipman for a travel story, our meals had been assembled in Southampton.

Of course, not everyone could be protected by holiday company guarantees. The chief drawback of being European soldiers, administrators, tea and rubber planters and residents, in the days of the empire and the Raj, was the food. Sooner or later everyone ‘succumbed to a variety of illnesses, to dysentery and malaria’.

But you can’t subsist forever on tins and packet soups. If I myself spent more time on the lavvy when I returned from India than I’d spent in the country in the first place, no wonder — bottled water often comes from the kitchen hose pipe, the plastic caps re-sealed with a heated pin.

It’s at this juncture Professor Bender gets a bit woke and political. He’s unhappy with the traditional view about the ‘ignorance, superstition and filthiness of the natives’.

Bender doesn’t like the way ‘tourists enjoyed the racial privilege of servants’, and he’s dismissive of the Hilton hotels’ Trader Vic’s bars, as they represented a false, kitsch idea of Polynesia as ‘a primitive paradise of sensuous women’. He’ll be glad to know, therefore, that the London branch closed last December after 60 years. It was where Peter Sellers took Britt Ekland on their first date.

Where I see travel as involving fantasy, grand hotels, says Bender, were a continuation of imperialism — the demand for comfortable rooms with telephones and private bathrooms ‘a relic of imperialism’.

He is one of those authors, of whom there is an increasing number, encouraged by progressive publishers, who can’t stop fretting about ‘the legacies of race and racism that had produced not only the empire but fascism’. Which is a lot to deduce from a mention of bamboo salad.

A cluster of illnesses in Oklahoma could have been caused by swimming in water contaminated with urine from rats, an expert suggests.

Several people have fallen ill after taking a dip in rivers and lakes near Bartlesville city, in the east of the state, officials say.

They are believed to be suffering from meningitis, or an inflammation of the lining of the brain or spinal cord caused by an infection.

Testing has already ruled out the brain-eating amoeba naegleria fowleri, which can lurk in stagnant water, but infectious disease expert Dr Thomas Russo said the cases may instead have been caused by a bacteria found in animal urine.

Health officials are urging people living in the area not to swim in rivers and lakes in the area before Memorial Day this weekend, the unofficial start of summer. 

Among those affected is 14-year-old Keeghan Smith, who got sick after swimming in Copan Lake near Bartlesville.

His grandmother Terri Smith told FOX News 23: ‘He was having a terrible headache, running a fever, and had a kind of purple rash on his chest.

‘It weren’t just a normal headache for a little kid, it was a bad headache.’

She said he was being treated for suspected meningitis by doctors.

Testing showed he did not have Primary Amebic Meningoencephalitis, or PAM, which is caused by N. fowleri.

Another boy is also believed to have fallen ill with meningitis after swimming in the Caney River, which runs from Copan Lake through Bartlesville.

Dr Russo, from the University of Buffalo in New York, suggested to LiveScience that it was most likely the boys had been infected by a bacteria from the urine of animals — including rats, cattle and pigs.

Leptospira can lurk in these animals and then be excreted in their urine.

This can flow into waterways, or be washed into them by heavy rains, where the bacteria can remain for weeks.

When humans swim in contaminated water, swallow it or go into the water with an open cut or graze they can then become infected. 

The infection — medically termed leptospirosis — emerges within a few days to a few weeks later.

Symptoms begin with fever, headache and muscle pain, but can then progress to jaundice, trouble breathing and meningitis.

There are up to 150 cases of infection with the bacteria in the US every year. But the disease is rarely fatal, with about one in 50 patients dying from the illness.

Outbreaks have previously been linked to animal urine, including a 2018 outbreak in Israel that led to 583 suspected cases after people swam in contaminated water. Leptospira bacteria in the water were eventually linked to urine from wild boars and cattle.

Dr Russo also suggested other explanations for the infections including enteroviruses  — normally behind stomach problems — lurking in freshwater that were then ingested or Listeria, a cause of food poisoning that can also hide in water.

‘If the water was contaminated with an enterovirus and was ingested, it could potentially cause a meningitis syndrome,’ Dr Russo said.

The state health department also says there is a drought in the area at present, which can cause pollutants in water to become more concentrated.

They are urging people to avoid swimming in rivers and lakes ahead of Memorial Day celebrations this weekend. 

They said in a statement: ‘The [Health Department] is investigating a cluster of illnesses in the Bartlesville area.

‘What we know at this time is a few individuals have presented to healthcare providers with varying symptoms.

‘Initial testing has been negative for primary amebic meningoencephalitis, or PAM, caused by the organism Naegleria fowleri.’

They added: ‘We are continuing to monitor for more individuals who may be sick as a part of this cluster. 

‘While investigations continue, if individuals feel ill, we encourage them to reach out to their healthcare provider and discuss their symptoms.’