Rabies at the Farm Adventures petting zoo: were you there, and who do you call?

If you touched a baby goat from the Farm Adventures mobile petting zoo between July 28 and Aug. 27, 2026, North Carolina says to call a health department. Its notice, word for word: “Impacted individuals should contact their local health department to determine whether medications are needed to prevent infection.” The notice does not print a single phone number. The seven counties in its own venue list are below, with the numbers the State publishes elsewhere.

There is no deadline counted from the day you were there, and this page is not going to invent one. The notice's own condition is “Rabies is almost always fatal in mammals, including people, unless medications to prevent infections are given before symptoms develop.” — before symptoms, not before a date — and it says “Symptoms can begin weeks to months after someone is exposed.” That is why an exposure in July is still worth a call in September, and it is also why the call is worth making today rather than when something appears.

Were you there?

The qualifying sentence, word for word: “Anyone who had contact with baby goats from the Farm Adventures mobile petting zoo either at their location in Harmony, North Carolina, or at an off-site event, between July 28 and Aug. 27, 2026, may have been exposed while the animals were infectious.”

The notice then lists the dates and places it knows about. These are its words, in its order.

Every date and address above is quoted from NCDHHS — NCDHHS Shares New Details About Rabies at Mobile Petting Zoo, 29 August 2026, read 2026-09-04. The county numbers are not in that notice; they are from NCDHHS Division of Public Health — Find Your Local Health Department, read the same day. Nothing on this page is our own arithmetic — there is none to do.

6 of the 10 entries are private events with no address. If you were at a private gathering on one of those dates in Mecklenburg, Watauga, Burke, Durham, Iredell, you cannot rule yourself in or out from this page — and you may not have been contacted yet. The notice says “Public health officials are working with event organizers to notify attendees who might have had contact with the infected goats at these events.” Waiting to be contacted is not the same as being told you were not exposed. The county line for your event's county is in the table above.

The list can grow. This page read the notice on 2026-09-04, and on that day it said “This investigation is ongoing and additional information about potential exposure locations at public events will be released when available.” If you are reading this later, open the notice itself and check whether a venue has been added.

What to do

• Call the county health department for the event you were at — the number is in the table above, and there is one for each of the seven counties. The notice's instruction is “Impacted individuals should contact their local health department to determine whether medications are needed to prevent infection.”
• Call before you go anywhere. The notice is explicit: “Individuals are encouraged to call before visiting an emergency department or urgent care clinic to determine if treatment is needed and where it can be accessed.” Turning up at an emergency department unannounced is the thing it asks you not to do.
• If you live outside those seven counties, call the health department where you live. The State's list covers all 100 counties: NCDHHS Division of Public Health — Find Your Local Health Department.

What the notice says to watch for

“Early symptoms are flu-like illness including weakness, fever or headache as well as a prickling or itching sensation where someone was bitten or exposed.”

Those symptoms are the deadline this page cannot give you as a date. The notice's sentence is that the medication works “before symptoms develop”, and that symptoms may be weeks or months away. If any of the above appears in someone who was at one of these events, that is a call to a doctor now, and the health department line as well.

One thing the notice settles, so you do not have to ask

Only the baby goats. Word for word: “Based on information gathered on August 28, it was determined that no other animals on the farm pose a risk of rabies exposure to people.”

The seven county health departments

This page does not know these lines' opening hours — the State's table gives an address and a number and nothing else, so we are not going to tell you one is answered at three in the morning. Where a county publishes its own number it matches: Iredell's communicable disease page gives 704-878-5300 for Statesville, and Durham Public Health's own site gives 919-560-7600.

Sources

• NCDHHS — NCDHHS Shares New Details About Rabies at Mobile Petting Zoo — 29 August 2026, read 2026-09-04
• NCDHHS Division of Public Health — Find Your Local Health Department — read 2026-09-04

NCDHHS publishes this release in Spanish on the same page, below the English. There is no Spanish version of this page yet — if you would rather read the State's own Spanish, it is on the notice itself.

This is not medical advice and this is not an official government site. Every sentence in quotation marks is copied from the two NCDHHS documents named above, with the day they were read. Whether you need the medication is a decision for the health department and a doctor, not for this page — it exists because the notice told ten venues' worth of people to call a health department and printed no number.

The other North Carolina page on this site: Exposed to measles in North Carolina — can you go to work? A different notice and a different disease; the same State, and the same question of who has to be told and by when.