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Forty monkeys are on the loose in South Carolina after breaking out of a medical research facility.
Residents in 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 from the Alpha Genesis facility in the town on Wednesday, a testing center that tests experimental drugs and vaccines for various illnesses, infectious diseases and disorders.
Online, it describes itself as ‘one of the largest and most comprehensive non-human primate facilities, designed specifically for monkeys, in the US’.
It was not clear how the monkeys escaped, but three primates escaped in 2022 after a road accident. Several monkeys also escaped this past May.
One person said on X, formerly Twitter: ‘The monkeys escape from Yemassee every year. That s*** happens every year! The workers forget to lock up the cages and they go crazy!’
Police in Yemassee have now 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 facility in South Carolina. Pictured above is a wild macaque drinking from a plastic bottle in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Revealing the escape, the local sheriff Department said on Facebook: ‘Residents are strongly advised to keep doors and windows secured to prevent these animals from entering homes.
‘If you spot any of the escaped animals, please contact 911 immediately and refrain from approaching them.’
The primates were housed in a facility on Castle Road in the town of Yemassee. Alpha Genesis also runs another center for housing monkeys on Morgan Island, just off the coast of South Carolina.
Alpha Genesis houses more than 6,000 monkeys at any given time which are used in clinical research.
In June 2018, it was fined $12,000 by the federal government over six violations — four of which involved escapes from the facility.
The first occasion was in 2014, when 26 monkeys escaped and were on the loose for 48 hours.
Just a week later a single monkey escaped and was never found.
Two more monkeys escaped six months later and then one died from internal injuries that occurred after it was shot with a dart during its recapture.
And in 2016, another monkey escaped because its cage was secured with a clip rather than a lock.
There were also two other violations, including one monkey being placed in the wrong social group, leading to it being attacked and suffering from fatal internal injuries, and an incident where at least six monkeys suffered from severe dehydration.