Forty monkeys are at large in South Carolina after escaping from a medical research facility.
Residents of Yemassee, a town of 1,000 less than 50 miles west of Charleston, have been told to lock their doors and windows to prevent the potentially disease-ridden primates from entering their homes.
The animals escaped on Wednesday from the city’s Alpha Genesis facility, a testing center that tests experimental drugs and vaccines for various diseases, infectious diseases and conditions.
Online, it describes itself as “one of the largest and most comprehensive non-human primate facilities, designed specifically for apes, in the US.”
It was not clear how the monkeys escaped, but in 2022 three primates escaped after a traffic accident. Several monkeys also escaped last May.
One person said on X, formerly Twitter: “The monkeys escape from Yemassee every year. That happens every year! The workers forget to lock the cages and go crazy!’
Police in Yemassee have now deployed traps and thermal cameras in an attempt to capture the escaped primates.
The facility says online that it works with both macaques and capuchin monkeys.
Forty monkeys have escaped from a research facility in South Carolina. Above, a wild macaque is seen drinking from a plastic bottle in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
In revealing the escape, the local sheriff’s department said on Facebook: ‘Residents are strongly advised to keep doors and windows secured to prevent these animals from entering homes.
“If you see any of the escaped animals, contact 911 immediately and do not approach them.”
The primates were housed in a facility on Castle Road in the city of Yemassee. Alpha Genesis also runs another monkey housing center on Morgan Island, just off the coast of South Carolina.
Alpha Genesis houses more than 6,000 monkeys used in clinical research at any given time.
In June 2018, it was fined $12,000 by the federal government for six violations, four of which related to escapes from the facility.
The first time was in 2014, when 26 monkeys escaped and wandered for 48 hours.
Just a week later, a single monkey escaped and was never found.
Six months later, two more monkeys escaped and one died from internal injuries that occurred after the animal was shot with an arrow during the recapture.
And in 2016, another monkey escaped because its cage was secured with a clip instead of a lock.
There were also two other violations, including one monkey being placed in the wrong social group, which resulted in it being attacked and suffering fatal internal injuries, and an incident in which at least six monkeys suffered from severe dehydration.