Outbreak Focuses Attention On Texas ‘Monkey Farm’

It’s an improbable spot for a media swarm, this ragged, one-lane farm road in the sunburned flats of south Texas, eight miles from the nearest town. But thanks to an outbreak of the dreaded Ebola virus among imported monkeys, a national press frenzy has descended on a remote animal breeding facility called HRP Inc., also known as the Texas Primate Center.

The locals just call it “the monkey farm.”

Texas Commissioner of Health David R. Smith stressed Wednesday that “the public has never been in danger, and still isn’t.”

Despite such reassurances, the word “Ebola” has such macabre magnetism that the press left the news briefing and promptly encamped outside HRP’s main entrance to await further developments. Dozens of journalists milled restlessly around the heavily padlocked gate to the compound. The 6-foot-high chain-link fence surrounding the facility was locked up tight and the staff was largely invisible.

What was visible was acre upon acre of identical silo-shaped pens, each 13 feet high and 12 feet in diameter, containing some 5,500 rhesus and cynomolgus macaques eventually bound for research labs around the country. There are between eight and 10 adults, or as many as 20 juveniles, in each of 700 pens.

HRP is part of a large, federally regulated industry supplying animals for medical research: 1,624,649 warmblooded creatures in 1994 alone, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures, and that’s not counting birds, mice, rats and farm livestock.