Get treated first. This page is about the claim; infection is a medical emergency long before it is a legal question, and a bite that is warm, swollen, increasingly painful, or weeping needs a clinician today rather than a search engine.
Why dog bites infect so readily
A dog bite is a puncture as much as a laceration. Teeth drive bacteria deep into tissue and then the surface closes over, which is close to an ideal arrangement for an infection to develop out of sight.
This is why a wound that looked fine on day one can be seriously infected on day three, and why clinicians frequently leave bite wounds open or only loosely closed rather than suturing them tightly.
Hands, joints, and deep puncture wounds carry the highest risk. So does any delay before the wound was properly cleaned.
Why this matters for a claim
It converts a minor bite into a major one. A single puncture that needed a dressing becomes a course of intravenous antibiotics, a hospital admission, debridement surgery, or in serious cases permanent damage to a joint or tendon.
It arrives after people have made decisions. Someone who accepted a few hundred pounds from a neighbour on day two, or signed a release, has no route back when the hospital admission happens on day five. This is the concrete reason not to settle early — not lawyerly caution, but the specific shape of how dog bites go wrong.
It is entirely foreseeable. Infection is not an unusual complication that breaks the chain of causation. It is the expected risk of this injury, and treatment for it forms part of the claim under § 767.04 like any other consequence of the bite.
What to document
- The date symptoms started, separately from the date of the bite
- Photographs of the wound as it changed — the progression is the evidence
- Every clinical contact, including the ones that turned out to be precautionary
- Antibiotics prescribed, and any change of antibiotic
- Time off work attributable to the infection rather than the original wound
Make sure the medical record states the wound was a dog bite. Infection treated without that context is much harder to tie back later.
Rabies and the vaccination question
Separate from infection, and separate again from your civil claim. Where a dog’s vaccination history cannot be confirmed — a stray, an unidentified dog, an owner who will not produce records — that changes clinical decision-making and needs raising with a clinician immediately.
It is also a reason to report to your county animal services promptly: they are the route to confirming a dog’s vaccination status, and Florida splits that function from the animal investigation.
If you were told it was minor
A claim that looked not worth pursuing on day one can look very different on day six. If you were told, or decided, that a bite was too small to matter and it has since become infected, that assessment was made on different facts. When a minor bite is worth pursuing.