Lydia Glenn

News Editor

lmg5921@psu.edu

On Friday, January 21, a shipment of lab monkeys escaped from a van after an accident on Interstate 80 in Danville, Pennsylvania. The shipment of monkeys was on their way to a Center for Disease Control approved quarantine facility at an undisclosed location when the transport pickup crashed. 

The crash occurred when the pickup containing the monkeys collided with a dump truck.

After the crash, several monkeys had escaped and fled the crash site. Police said that by Friday night, less than 24 hours after the accident, all but one monkey was found and accounted for. 

The search mission for the one remaining monkey prompted the Pennsylvania Game Commission to become involved and launched a search effort to find the monkey. 

Police in PA urged members of the public not to look for or capture any monkeys that they may have come across. Troopers tweeted out over their accounts, “Anyone who sees or locates the monkey is asked not to approach, attempt to catch, or come in contact with the monkey. Please call 911 immediately.”

Lauren Lesher who is a trooper in the affected PA area said to reporters that the concern was “due to it not being a domesticated animal and them being in an unknown territory. It is hard to say how they would react to a human approaching them.” 

Early Saturday morning, an email sent by Kristen Nordlund, a spokesperson with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, confirmed that all monkeys were found and accounted for after the search from the PA Game Commission. 

The email also contained information that three of the monkeys were euthanized. The email never stated why the three monkeys were euthanized.

Luckily, the drivers of both trucks were uninjured, but transported to a nearby medical center for the treatment of suspected minor injuries. 

Michelle Fallon, a witness of the crash said that she spoke to the pickup driver and the passenger shortly after the crash. She claimed that the driver appeared to be disoriented and the passenger was concerned about his legs. 

Fallon also said she saw the crash happen as she was behind the pickup carrying the monkeys when the accident occurred. 

She stated that the pickup had gotten off Interstate 80 West on the Danville exit and then immediately tried to get back on. While trying to correct their mistake, the driver drove across the other lane and was hit on the passenger side by the dump truck.

Fallon also said that after the crash, she saw more than a dozen crates tumbling out of the back of the pickup trunk. She stated that she peeked in the crates to see what the cargo was, and they were monkeys. She looked at the other driver who helped to stop and said, “They’re monkeys.”

According to AP News, the monkeys were cynomolgus macaque monkeys from the Indian Ocean Island nation of Mauritius. 

The macaque monkeys were being shipped over and transported to this facility allegedly for preclinical toxicological studies. 

AP News reported that cynomolgus macaque monkeys are often used in medical studies and a paper published in 2015 on the website of the National Center for Biotechnology Information referred to them as the most widely used primate for testing.