German health authorities on Tuesday recommended an isolation period of at least 21 days for those infected with monkeypox, as the World Health Organization (WHO) reported about 250 cases from 16 countries where the disease has been recently detected.
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach on Tuesday said that, "in the early stages of an epidemic, there needs to be a tough and quick response."
Contact persons should also be quarantined for 21 days, Lauterbach said, adding that he had ordered "up to 40,000 doses" of a vaccine.
He said vaccination could help contain the spread of monkeypox by offering them to contact persons, a technique known as "ring vaccination."
British health authorities said on Tuesday they had administered more than 1,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine Imvanex to contact persons.
Several states in Germany have reported evidence of monkeypox infections, with contact tracing under way in each location.
Lauterbach said that the monkeypox was "not the beginning of a new pandemic," and that it was, furthermore, a known pathogen with known methods of containing it.
Slovenia and the Czech Republic both reported their first confirmed cases of monkeypox on Tuesday.
WHO expert Rosamund Lewis said in Geneva that the outbreak could be contained. The current cluster of cases is worrying, but the risk to the public is low, she said.
The infections recorded worldwide primarily concern men who have had sex with other men. In contrast to the coronavirus, transmission via airborne particles is negligible.
The virus usually causes only mild symptoms such as fever, headache, muscle pain and skin rash. However, monkeypox can also be severe, and in individual cases fatal illnesses are possible.
