Health – Hanover – Vaccination against monkeypox started in Lower Saxony – Health
Hanover (dpa / lni) – Vaccination against monkeypox has started in Lower Saxony. As the Ministry of Health in Hanover announced, vaccinations are given in HIV-focused practices. The federal and state governments had agreed on this. The doctors in these practices specialize in the treatment of patients infected with HIV or suffering from AIDS.
By Friday, the Lower Saxony State Health Office (NLGA) had received 18 PCR-confirmed cases of monkeypox infections. All affected people between the ages of 18 and 65 are male, said a ministry spokesman for the German Press Agency. The average age is 39 years.
The Standing Vaccination Commission (Stiko) recommends the smallpox vaccine Imvanex for people who are particularly at risk. These include, for example, adults who have had contact with infected people and men who have same-sex sexual contact with changing partners. The experts at the State Health Office assume that there will be more reports, but that the number will remain “within a manageable framework”. A week earlier there had been eight confirmed cases for Lower Saxony.
As of Thursday, five monkeypox patients were registered in the Hanover region and two affected people in the city of Braunschweig. There was one infected person each in the city of Osnabrück and in the districts of Diepholz, Göttingen, Hameln, Hildesheim, Northeim, Osnabrück and Schaumburg.
Hamburg had 49 cases on Wednesday. Nationwide, 1054 monkeypox cases from all 16 federal states had been transmitted to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) by Friday, only one of them from Bremen.
According to the RKI, monkeypox is a rare viral disease that is probably transmitted to humans primarily from rodents. In contrast to human smallpox (Variola), which has been eradicated since 1980, they are usually much milder. Most people recover from within a few weeks, although some sufferers can experience severe disease.
On June 22, Lower Saxony received a first batch of smallpox vaccine with 1,200 individual doses. The next deliveries are expected this month, according to the ministry.
© dpa-infocom, dpa:220703-99-890416/2