Residents of a Pennsylvania county are being warned not to approach a lab monkey that is missing after a Pennsylvania traffic crash.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency was providing “technical assistance" to state police. The shipment of monkeys was en route to a CDC-approved quarantine facility after arriving Friday morning at New York's Kennedy Airport from Mauritius, the agency said.
The location of the lab and the type of research for which the monkeys were destined weren’t clear, but cynomolgus monkeys are often used in medical studies. A 2015 paper posted on the website of the National Center for Biotechnology Information referred to them as the most widely used primate in preclinical toxicology studies.
A crash witness, Michelle Fallon, told the Press Enterprise newspaper of Bloomsburg that she spoke with the pickup driver and a passenger after the crash. The driver appeared to be disoriented, and the passenger thought he might have injured his legs, she said. The pickup was heading west on I-80 when it got off at the Danville exit and then immediately tried to get back on, driving across the other lane, the newspaper reported.