About Staff

The relationship - the fight - between humans and pathogens is age old. In Southeast Asian countries, enteric infections are one of the most important infections and are related to local food culture. Now that millions of people travel abroad and foods are imported from many Asian countries, we have additional problems with infectious disease. When we protect our life in this environment, it is important to have a broad perspective on infectious diseases and the hygiene situation.

What is the concept of food safety? Essentially this means safety from infection by pathogens. Designing a food risk assessment system on a global scale is important for the food circumstances of our country today. The various pathogens causing infectious disease contaminate foods imported from Asian countries; when brought into Japan via imported food, infectious diseases can spread quickly. This type of spread of infectious diseases through the movement of humans and things is something that has been repeated throughout human history. I use the techniques of molecular biology and molecular epidemiology to analyze pathogens which cause infectious diseases and aim to understand their dynamic movement.