SEOUL: Yoon Suk-yeol, the president of South Korea, called for tougher precautions against the spread of monkeypox on Wednesday after the nation reported its first two suspected cases the day before, an official said.

According to a presidential official quoted by Yonhap news, Yoon gave health authorities instructions to tighten quarantine measures for foreign arrivals and to closely monitor any potential for more cases.

According to the official, Yoon also instructed health officials to "be fully prepared to promptly deploy the available vaccines and treatments to the medical front-lines and to finish the introduction of third-generation vaccines and antiviral treatments against monkeypox as soon as feasible."

The findings of the diagnostic tests that have been done on the two suspected instances by health authorities are anticipated later on Wednesday. They said,  one of the suspected patients is a foreign national who entered the country on Monday, while the other is a South Korean national who entered the country on Tuesday.

The foreign person was admitted to a hospital in the southeastern city of Busan after complaining of a sore throat, skin sores and other probable symptoms of the monkeypox virus.

The South Korean apparently displayed symptoms two days before arriving at Incheon International Airport from Germany at around four o'clock on Tuesday. The victim has been admitted to Incheon Medical Center in Incheon, west of Seoul.

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