$20,000 monkeys: inside the booming illicit trade for lab animals

A lucrative underground trade risks undermining research, creating new pandemics and pushing a recently abundant species to the brink

In 2019, Jonah Sacha, a researcher at Oregon Health and Science University, received a delivery of 20 monkeys from Mauritius. As part of his research into stem-cell transplants as an HIV treatment, he performs tests on long-tailed macaques.

The captive-bred monkeys were legally imported using an approved vendor, and looked healthy. However, when Sacha tested them, one appeared to have latent tuberculosis (TB).