Forty monkeys are on the loose in South Carolina after escaping from a medical research facility.
Residents of Yemassee, a city of 1,000 people less than 50 miles west of Charleston, have been asked to lock their doors and windows to prevent potentially infected 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, illnesses and infectious disorders.
Online, it describes itself as “one of the largest and most comprehensive non-human primate facilities, designed specifically for monkeys, in the United States.”
It was unclear how the monkeys escaped, but three primates escaped in 2022 after a traffic accident. Several monkeys also escaped last May.
One person said on X, formerly Twitter: ‘Monkeys escape from Yemassee every year. That shit happens every year! The workers forget to close the cages and go crazy!’
Yemassee police have deployed traps and thermal cameras in an attempt to apprehend the escaped primates.
The facility says online that it works with both macaque and capuchin monkeys.
Forty monkeys have escaped from a research center in South Carolina. Pictured above is a wild macaque drinking from a plastic bottle in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Revealing the escape, the local Sheriff’s Department said on Facebook: “Residents are strongly encouraged to keep doors and windows secured to prevent these animals from entering their homes.”
“If you see any of the escaped animals, contact 911 immediately and refrain from approaching them.”
The primates were housed at a facility on Castle Road in the town of Yemassee. Alpha Genesis also runs another monkey housing facility on Morgan Island, off the coast of South Carolina.
Alpha Genesis houses more than 6,000 monkeys at any given time that are used in clinical research.
In June 2018, the federal government fined him $12,000 for six violations, four of which involved leaks from the facility.
The first occasion was in 2014, when 26 monkeys escaped and were loose for 48 hours.
Just a week later, a monkey escaped and was never found.
Two more monkeys escaped six months later and one later died from internal injuries sustained after being shot with a dart during recapture.
And in 2016, another monkey escaped because its cage was secured with a clip instead of a padlock.
There were also two other violations, including a monkey being placed in the wrong social group, which caused it to be attacked and suffer fatal internal injuries, and an incident in which at least six monkeys suffered severe dehydration.