It is heartbreaking to hear what is done to these thousands of monkeys brought into the USA. It is also extremely dangerous to us, and we'll find out why in this episode.

About Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel:

She is a senior science advisor on primate experimentation for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

A Fulbright scholar who has studied the human-primate interface in Africa, Asia, and the primate biomedical facilities of the U.S. for nearly 40 years, she has published 95 peer-reviewed articles spanning the fields of primatology, virology, epidemiology, microbiology, and conservation.

Her work includes addressing the neglect and disease risk posed by the University of Washington’s Washington National Primate Research Center, where she worked before coming to PETA.

DID YOU KNOW:

Since the start of the pandemic nearly 70,000 monkeys have been imported into the U.S. These monkeys arrived from more than 300 international shipments and were then trucked to secretive quarantine facilities.

Quarantine is designed to protect public health by detecting monkeys arriving with viral hemorrhagic fevers, tuberculosis, pathogens that can cause deadly diarrheal diseases, fatal diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, and Herpes B—a zoonotic macaque virus.

Not all the monkeys make it out of quarantine alive and it is not uncommon for  dangerous pathogens to be missed, showing up months or years later to threaten public health and further undermine the utility of these monkeys as biomedical models.

Primate facilities in Texas and Louisiana acknowledge that the thousands of monkeys whom they are housing outdoors are reservoirs for deadly parasites that can spill over into human populations.

PETA has been urging the NIH to move away from experiments on animals, and its campaigns have shut down numerous NIH-funded experiments, including shocking psychological experiments on baby monkeys taken from their mothers shortly after birth.