Tirion Boan
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When you go to the Arizona State Fair with your kid, you expect to stuff them with cotton candy, spin them through the Tilt-A-Whirl and put them to bed feeling a little woozy at worst. That wasn’t the case for Elizabeth Felix. She left the Arizona State Fair last year with a 6-year-old son who’d contracted an E. coli infection from the fair’s petting zoo.
Felix sued the fair last week on behalf of her son, Julian Lopez. Lopez got so sick that he was hospitalized for weeks, according to the complaint. He suffered from hemolytic uremic syndrome, a complication from E. coli infections that can cause kidney failure, and had to undergo dialysis. He’s expected to have chronic medical complications from the infection. She accused the fair of negligence for not taking proper precautions or training its staff to prevent the spread of E. coli from the petting zoo.
“These little kids, they pet the goats and they roll around in hay and stuff. They get poop on their hands and they eat or candy or popcorn or whatever,” Ron Simon, Felix’s attorney, told Phoenix New Times. “It’s horrible, but it’s so preventable.”
Felix is asking the fair to cover Lopez’s medical bills and to pay for damages and future medical care costs. So far the family has racked up $453,035 in medical bills, according to the complaint, and estimates that those costs could total $3 million over his lifetime.
“They want to make sure that they’re fully and fairly compensated for the medical bills and lost wages and pain and suffering that their child has and will go through,” Simon said.
The Arizona State Fair did not respond to requests for comment.
Lopez was one of dozens of children hospitalized with E. coli from the petting zoo at last year’s fair. Several of them suffered the same kidney complications. Simon said the lawsuit, which was filed in Maricopa Superior Court on Aug. 3, is the first one filed against the fair for the outbreak.
Doctors first noticed young patients with E. coli symptoms in late October, according to reporting at the time. The common thread was that they’d all been to the petting zoo at the fair, which ran from Sept. 19 to Oct. 26. The Arizona Department of Health investigated the outbreak but did not release information about its source, reporting by AZCentral found. Instead parents went public with the help of Parker’s Promise, a Tennessee-based nonprofit that focuses on “environmental pathogenic illness.”
Felix and Lopez spent a lot of time in the petting sections of the fair, especially with the goats and potbelly pigs, before getting food and looking at other exhibits when they attended on Oct. 26, according to the complaint.
“While there were no readily available wash-stations, there was hand sanitizer, which they availed themselves of,” the complaint read.
By Oct. 29 Lopez showed symptoms of E. coli poisoning, which includes bloody diarrhea, fever and abdominal pain. He was hospitalized at Phoenix Children’s Hospital on Nov. 1 and tested for E. coli. By Nov. 3, he was diagnosed with the most severe version of hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can cause kidney failure, especially in young children. He underwent multiple dialysis treatments and was hospitalized for 21 days.
“Julian will need to be monitored for many years and has a high probability of kidney failure and the need for a kidney transplant as he matures,” the complaint reads.
