According to a case report published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases and detailed by ScienceAlert, a 39-year-old man in Germany had to endure the trauma and grizzly sight of hitting a deer with his car after it had already been hit by another vehicle traveling in the opposite direction, which eventually led to a rare bacterial infection.
The guy was driving along a road when a roe deer wandered into the street. It was hit by an oncoming vehicle, then bounced into his windshield, shattering it, sending glass in his face, along with plenty of “animal blood, bodily fluids from eviscerated organs (eg, intestines), and soil” that “contaminated his wounds,” say the authors of the paper.
About a week later, the guy developed a fever, some swelling beneath his jaw, and had a lesion near his eye, inflamed lymph nodes in his neck, all of which were unresolved by a round of antibiotics. A month after the crash, he had multiple abscesses on his face that needed surgical drainage.
A Deer Crashed Through His Windshield. A Week Later, He Got Seriously Sick.
Figuring something else was deeply wrong, doctors eventually ran tests and found Francisella tularensis, a bacterium responsible for tularemia, also known as rabbit fever. It usually spreads through tick bites and deer flies. It usually starts with what feels like a fever and flu-like symptoms, then can progress to sores and ulcers.
It can be potentially life-threatening. Rabbit fever has been in the news lately, as New York State recently reported its fourth case of rabbit fever in 2026.
Doctors believe that the deer was infected with the bacterium, and the injuries caused by the collision allowed it to enter his wounds. With the cause figured out, the doctors switched the patient from general antibiotics to ciprofloxacin. He started to feel better, and three months later the abscesses had largely disappeared.
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