Now We Have to Worry About Monkey Herpes on Top of Everything Else

Adorable: Florida’s got a growing population of wild monkeys. Less adorable: They all have herpes.

According to WFTV, there’s a population of about 200 wild monkeys at Silver Springs State Park in Central Florida that are carrying a strain of the herpes virus that is deadly to humans. So. Great. Good to know.

The virus, McHV-1, is transmittable through a bite or scratch, and authorities are urging people to leave monkeys the hell alone:

“People should never approach these animals,” said University of Florida professor Steve Johnson, who was part of a team that spent years studying the monkeys. “People shouldn’t feed them. It’s not legal to feed them anymore.”

The rhesus macaques were brought to the park in the 1930s as a tourist attraction, and now they’re everywhere, using park pavilions as crime dens, attempting to derail the educations of schoolchildren, getting aggressive with tourists, and plotting ways to kill us all with herpes and take over the planet, probably. There’s only one way this ends and that’s with Lady Liberty’s severed torso washed up on the beach.