A truck that was transporting monkeys overturned on a highway in the US state of Mississippi, allowing the animals to escape, local officials say.<\/p>\n
“All but one of the escaped monkeys have been destroyed,” the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department said. But in a later update, it said officials had since been able to “get a correct count” and determined three monkeys were still on the loose.<\/p>\n
The monkeys were being housed at Tulane University’s National Biomedical Research Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, for scientific research purposes. <\/p>\n
The sheriff’s department had warned the monkeys were carrying diseases, but Tulane University later said they had not been exposed to \u201cany infectious agent\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is unclear exactly how many monkeys were initially on the truck, who owned them, where they were being taken, who was transporting them or why the truck overturned. <\/p>\n
Tulane University said the animals “were not being transported by Tulane, not owned by Tulane, and not in Tulane’s custody”.<\/p>\n
It added that although Tulane “did not transport or own the nonhuman primates at the time of the incident”, it sent “a team of animal care experts to assist” officials.<\/p>\n
Videos shared online showed the monkeys moving through the tall grass on the side of the Mississippi highway. On the highway were wooden crates with the label \u201clive animals\u201d. <\/p>\n
The monkeys being transported were Rhesus monkeys, animals that are commonly used for medical study. <\/p>\n
In their initial report, officials quoted the driver of truck as saying that that the monkeys were dangerous and needed to be handled with personal protective equipment. <\/p>\n
That is what led to the officials to initially say that the monkeys were carrying diseases, though Tulane University later clarified that was not the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A truck that was transporting monkeys overturned on a highway in the US state of Mississippi, allowing the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232795,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-232794","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}