PETA Report: Tuberculosis Runs Rampant in Monkeys in U.S. Facilities, Threatening Public Health

For Immediate Release:
June 11, 2025

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

A groundbreaking new report from scientists at PETA reveals that multiple strains of tuberculosis (TB)—including a strain never before seen in U.S. animals—have been detected in dozens of monkeys imported for experimentation at facilities across the country.

Based on documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories and records of international imports and domestic transfers, the report exposes systemic biosecurity failures, reckless animal movement, and an alarming pattern of regulatory negligence. Chief among the enablers has been the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which in recent years continued to approve monkey imports from foreign suppliers known to ship infected animals—putting laboratory personnel, surrounding communities, and the integrity of biomedical research at serious risk.

The report shows the largest cluster of infected monkeys was found at Charles River Laboratories’ Houston, Texas, facility, where nearly 40 animals tested positive for tuberculosis between 2023 and 2024. Significant outbreaks also occurred at the company’s Frederick, Maryland, and Reno, Nevada, sites. Other infected monkeys were documented at Primate Products (Immokalee, FL), Worldwide Primates (Miami, FL), Envigo (Alice, TX), and even at a U.S. Army lab in Edgewood, Maryland.

These findings, illustrated in the chart below, expose a nationwide pattern of disease spread among commercial importers, contract testing labs, and government facilities—all operating under the false assurance of “clean” animals and CDC oversight.

In 2023, a shipment of monkeys from Vietnam arrived carrying Mycobacterium orygis—a dangerous strain of TB never detected in U.S. primates. Yet instead of cutting ties, Charles River Laboratories continued to import monkeys from the same supplier throughout the year, knowingly sustaining a pipeline of infected animals. The CDC acknowledged the outbreak in a published paper but failed to take meaningful action—allowing imports to continue and relying on diagnostic methods it knew were incapable of reliably detecting the disease.

“Cramming hundreds of sick, stressed monkeys into tiny crates and shipping them across the globe so they can be experimented on is a public health disaster waiting to happen,” says report co-author and PETA Senior Science Advisor for Primate Experimentation Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “PETA calls for an immediate halt to all primate imports and a federal investigation into how the CDC and USDA allowed a deadly, airborne disease to spread unchecked through U.S. research facilities.”

Charles River Laboratories failed to disclose in its 2024 and 2025 Nonhuman Primate Reports that it had imported tuberculosis-infected monkeys in 2023 and 2024—omitting critical information even as outbreaks unfolded inside its facilities. Other companies named in the PETA report—including Envigo, Inotiv, and Primate Products Inc.—were operating colonies where TB infections were detected, and during this same period, they continued selling monkeys to a wide network of clients, including Altasciences, the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC), Lovelace Biomedical, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, LabCorp, the New Iberia Research Center, and the University of Texas Medical Branch.

Whether the infections originated in newly imported monkeys or spread within their colonies, the result is the same: animals were shipped out while TB circulated—potentially seeding outbreaks at research institutions and contract labs across the country.

The tests used to detect TB in monkeys frequently produce false negatives, rendering the CDC’s quarantine protocols useless to prevent disease spread. In Michigan in 2023, necropsy reports found widespread TB infections in monkeys who months previously had passed the CDC’s mandatory quarantine and more than a dozen follow-up TB screening tests. As PETA revealed, two laboratory workers also tested positive after exposure during the outbreak.

PETA has distributed the report to American and Canadian regulatory agencies, companies involved in monkey importation and their clients, as well as airlines and transport companies. PETA calls for an immediate suspension of primate imports and coordination between U.S., Canadian, and Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) authorities to close enforcement gaps and prevent further cross-border risk.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.