When the first case of monkeypox was confirmed in Great Britain on May 5th, Clemens Wendtner in Munich already suspected what could happen to him.

The professor is chief physician for infectiology at the Munich Clinic Schwabing - one of only seven "Competence and Treatment Centers" in Germany that belong to a "Standing Working Group" for "Diseases caused by highly pathogenic pathogens", located at the Robert Koch Institute.

If the worst comes to the worst, these clinics are the first points of contact for doctors - and the addressees for infected patients.

In Munich there was “Patient Zero”

Timo Frasch

Political correspondent in Munich.

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Lucy Schmidt

Editor in the "Life" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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On May 19, the 56-year-old doctor says, he spoke to his senior physician about what to do if a patient suspected of having monkeypox came in, whether the "special isolation ward" should be activated.

The primary goal in these considerations: to protect your own staff as well as possible.

There is negative pressure in special isolation stations, and there is also a laboratory, a disinfection system and a sewage treatment plant.

Doctors and nurses work in special suits to protect them from stab wounds, for example.

They get air to breathe through a particle-tight portable intake filter in these full body suits.

On the evening of May 19, around half past eight, Wendtner was informed that there was a patient with monkeypox in the Munich area - just a few hours later, at 7:30 a.m. on May 20, the man arrived at Wendtner's clinic.

It was decided not to put him in the special isolation ward.

It was the professor's first time seeing monkeypox.

As is known today, this first patient in Germany is a 26-year-old Brazilian with a Portuguese passport who traveled to Germany from Lisbon, where he lives, via Spain.

After stops in Düsseldorf and Frankfurt, he had been in Munich for a week.

Wendtner describes his behavior when he noticed the symptoms themselves – fever, muscle pain, slight difficulty swallowing, especially the itchy pustules – as “level-headed” and “cooperative”: he immediately went to a large infectious disease practice in downtown Munich;

a smear was taken there, and after a short isolation in a hotel he ended up in the Munich clinic in Schwabing – where he was still staying at the time of going to press.

In Wendtner's department, which is not only responsible for the treatment of patients but also for gaining knowledge about new types of infectious diseases, he and his employees had a kind of déjà vu that May morning: A good two years earlier, they were the first German Corona case treated.

An employee of the auto supplier Webasto was infected by a colleague who had traveled from China.

At that time, Wendtner's department was almost in a state of emergency.

Monkeypox and Corona are not comparable

According to him, the fact that monkeypox was not able to stir up his people in a similar way is partly due to the experience of his team.

The most important reason, however, is that according to everything that is known so far, monkeypox cannot be compared to Corona, says the professor.

This is especially true for portability.

She is significantly lower.

Unlike Covid, monkeypox cannot be transmitted by aerosols.

But through droplets;

the cough must then be very wet and the physical contact very close, according to Wendtner.

Face-to-face transmissions, as the infectiologists unromantically call kissing, are possible.

Wendtner goes on to tell what has been learned about the clinical picture over the past few days: