Escaped Monkeys Not Quarantined After U.S. Arrival Yesterday: PETA Statement

For Immediate Release:
January 22, 2022

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the statement from primate scientist and PETA Science Advisor Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel on the news that the truck crash in Pennsylvania yesterday involved 100 monkeys who had just been brought to the U.S. from Mauritius and had not been quarantined:

U.S. experimenters are playing with fire and the rest of us may get burned. The monkeys scattered across the highway in a truck crash in Danville, PA, on Friday afternoon—in crates that a number of people peered into or touched without any protective gear—had just arrived from Mauritius the same day. They had not been quarantined, their health had not been assessed, and no one knows what pathogens they harbor. Anyone who has read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston is aware that in 1989, dozens of imported monkeys who were sent to Hazelton Laboratories in Reston, VA—later known as Covance and since acquired by Envigo—brought a never-before-seen strain of Ebola virus with them. Four humans became ill, and all the monkeys were killed. Ebola-Reston was brought into the U.S. again, this time to Texas, by another monkey. Importing monkeys and tormenting them in laboratories is likely to cause more human illness than experimenting on them will ever prevent.

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