Abstract
Toxoplasma gondii was first found in Ctenodactylus gondii by Nicolle and Manceaux (1908) in North Africa. In the same year, Mine found an unknown species of protozoa from the liver of a mole in Japan (Mine, 1911) and Prowazek (1910) identified it as Toxoplasma. Since then this protozoa has been found from various wild animals in Japan.
In 1937-1939 Wolf et al, reported a new case of encephalomyelitis of a child due to Toxoplasma infection (Wolf et al., 1937, 1939) . So this worm drew the attention of medical men as a cause of human disease and since then cases of human toxoplasmosis with obvious clinical symptoms have been reported by various workers in different countries.
In Japan, the first case of human toxoplasmosis was recorded only recently by Miyagawa et al. (1954), and since then many papers on Toxoplasma and toxoplasmosis have been published by various workers. The following is the summary of the studies on human toxoplasmosis and its possible source of infection in Japan.
