State health officials announced Thursday that they have pinpointed a petting zoo as the source of an E. coli outbreak that sickened dozens of people that attended the State Fair two months ago.
Through extensive environmental testing and genetic fingerprinting, public health investigators have linked many of the cases to the Crossroads Farm Petting Zoo.
Investigators reported 108 likely E. coli cases in people that had attended the Oct. 15-24 fair in Raleigh. Forty-three of those cases were confirmed by lab tests.
Thirty-three of the confirmed cases had identical genetic fingerprints, and those fingerprints matched positive E. coli samples from the Crossroads Farm Petting Zoo site, officials said. The outbreak genetic strain was not identified in environmental specimens collected at other areas of the State Fair grounds.