E.Coli Scares At Petting Zoos

No one ever said state fairs were the healthiest of places -- what with corn dogs and deep fried Twinkies. But forget the Midway. At the fair's petting zoos, Handi Wipes are flying like confetti at a ticker tape parade, CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan reports.

No wonder.

After a 2-year-old's petting party, she found herself in intensive care with kidney failure.

"This was a perfectly healthy child before she went to that petting zoo,"

The culprit: E.coli –- a bacteria at the less friendly end of the petting spectrum.

"We could have brought it home on our shoes," Liz Gray, Aiden's mother, explains. "It might be that the goats jumped up on them. We probably brought it home on their clothes."

Hundreds of others have gotten sick too. Outbreaks, some fear, are putting a fair favorite in jeopardy.

Perhaps it is, as one person put it, another example of "life will kill you," Cowan says. Come on, a petting zoo, dangerous? Well, it turns out there is just enough of a risk that forced health officials in North Carolina and elsewhere to make changes in a long standing tradition."

"You've seen the goat free for alls? That's a thing of the past,"

In Raleigh, a state law now mandates sheep and goats be separated from the children.

"You can still touch them," McBride says. "It's very important to the state of North Carolina that you can reach and touch the animal. We just don't want you walking in their bedding, stepping in the waste."

But in Dallas at the Texas State Fair, they cancelled their petting zoo altogether.

"We were all just a little bit shocked," Daryl Real of the Texas State Fair says.

Although there has never been an E.coli outbreak here, the Fair's insurance company wasn't willing to gamble.

Asked if it was absurd that children couldn't pet sheep and goats at the Texas fair, Real says bluntly, "I think most definitely."

Texas plans on following North Carolina's lead by putting in elaborate wash stations, along with signs, reminding parents that petting may come with a price: changes that might allow a petting zoo next year.

All too late for Aiden, who is now a diabetic.

"She says, 'I love goats.' Yeah, she loves animals," Liz Gray says of her daughter.

Another part of being a kid that just got more complicated.