How did this young farmer catch Pasteurella?
Again, as we don’t have any details of this death except reported by the media, we can only speculate. Apparently the victim had a blister on his hand, and then went out culling wild rabbits on his farm. If the blister had popped, it is easy to see that the broken skin at the base of the blister could have come into contact with the blood or nasal secretions of dead wild rabbits as they were collected. However, without forensic-like nucleic acid techniques to match the exact genetic strain of Pasteurella multocida in the human victim with the wild rabbits he handled, it cannot be certain that he even contracted the infection from the dead wild rabbits. The HPA website makes quite clear that in many cases, humans with Pasteurella infection have had no contact with animals at all.
