Beyond a security checkpoint and down a two-lane blacktop road that curves along the edge of a two-hundred-acre campus on San Antonio’s West Side, scientists cultivate and study some of the most virulent pathogens in the world. As the pandemic’s frightening early days ticked by, in spring 2020, researchers in full-body protective suits, working in one of the facility’s six Biosafety Level 3 labs, carefully loaded a syringe-like device with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Then they deliberately infected a rhesus macaque by compressing the end of the device to atomize the virus—dispersing it into tiny airborne particles directed up the monkey’s nose.Weighing about seventeen pounds, rhesus macaques are brown-gray primates with expressive pink faces and are native to much of southern Asia. Because…
The post The Monkeys Who Died to Fight COVID appeared first on Texas Monthly.
[source: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-biomedical-research-primate-testing/]
RSV vaccine recommended during pregnancy as a second option to protect newborns 
Kidney donors turned actors take the stage in Dallas this weekend 
When is the harvest moon supermoon this month? 
Austin’s Only Natural History Museum Nearly Went Extinct. Now It’s Back and Better Than Ever. 
Moose attacks woman and her dog on Colorado hiking trail