Three-year-old dies from rare bacterial infection contracted at petting farm

A three-year-old girl in Victoria has died after an ordinary visit to a petting farm became the beginning of six weeks in intensive care, her small body overwhelmed by a bacterial infection that destroyed her kidneys and damaged her brain beyond repair. The pathogen — Shiga toxin-producing E.coli, carried silently in the guts of farm animals — is a reminder that the boundary between the pastoral and the perilous is thinner than we imagine. Her death arrives amid a quietly rising tide of STEC cases across the state, and leaves behind parents whose grief is as simple and total as the words they