With regard to countermeasures to prevent damage to farm crop by wild animals, e.g. deer and boar, usage of them as meat has been promoted. No hygiene control is applied for them on their feed and health, and therefore they have risk of contamination with a variety of pathogens, such as Hepatitis E virus and Trichinella spp.. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan takes various measures to ensure the food safety of game meat - development and implementation of the Guidelines on Hygiene Management for Game Meat, measures to prevent it from contamination with radioactive substances and application of hygiene management along with HACCP to game meat processors.

Game meat, called as a French name, gibier in Japan, is recently becoming popular in the country. While researches on hazards for food safety are conducted and guidelines and facilities were prepared, risk assessments have not been much applied yet. This paper described available risk analysis and assessment frameworks for food safety as well as disease incursion and pandemic response, and discussed how they can be applied to gibier.

Codex Alimentarius Commission food safety risk assessment framework was the most applicable, but attention should be paid on gibier value chains and cultures on hunting and consumption behaviors. Communication with medical practitioners on the risk may be important and additional conduct of OIE framework consequence assessment for human cases would be beneficial.

In addition to food safety risk assessment, animal health risk assessment for the spread of wildlife disease to livestock population, and also pandemic risk assessment may be necessary. Moreover, environmental risks from over hunting and bullets, and economic risks for the actors along the value chains were found to be relevant.

While coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is mainly a pandemic prevalent in humans, the alterations in the social environment caused by the infection have also affected domestic animals. Exploratory and epidemiological investigations have revealed several findings. Particularly, in the COVID-19 pandemic areas, animal owners tended to stay home and chose telework, resulting in additional time with their animals. Moreover, concern about the animals getting infected have reduced their possibilities of going outdoors. A major concern was the apprehension of finding a suitable source of care for the animals when their owners were infected with COVID-19. Therefore, the impact of COVID-19 should be studied from multiple perspectives. However, the infection has also complicated the field investigations, forcing us to redefine our research methodologies.

Shelter medicine is an emerging veterinary medicine which involves animal shelters. It is originally defined as herd medicine for companion animals. The goal of shelter medicine is to not only improve animal welfare for homeless animals in the community, but also to improve public health through safe and secure adoption of animals from animal shelters, to reduce the number of homeless animals in the community, and to protect human-animal bonds. The reasons animals enter shelters include owner relinquishments, overpopulation, and animal abuse cases. These cases, such as animal hoardings by breeders and caregivers, are increasing in number and becoming problematic. Natural disasters such as floods and typhoons also create situations in which shelters are necessary for affected animals. Management of animals during disasters is important not only to save animals, but also to save human lives.

The recent pandemic of COVID-19 is affecting humans as well as animals. Pets that are owned by COVID-19 positive patients have to be safely managed, and shelter medicine plays a key role in such care. Shelter medicine can be effectively employed in providing appropriate information on handling COVID-19 exposed pets and ensuring a safe environment for both animals and personnel. Shelter medicine is a comprehensive veterinary medicine that deals with many aspects of animal problems in the community. The needs of this new discipline are expanding and should be established in Japan for animal welfare and public health. Shelter medicine is an emerging veterinary medicine which involves animal shelters. It is originally defined as herd medicine for companion animals. The goal of shelter medicine is to not only improve animal welfare for homeless animals in the community, but also to improve public health through safe and secure adoption of animals from animal shelters, to reduce the number of homeless animals in the community, and to protect human-animal bonds. The reasons animals enter shelters include owner relinquishments, overpopulation, and animal abuse cases. These cases, such as animal hoardings by breeders and caregivers, are increasing in number and becoming problematic. Natural disasters such as floods and typhoons also create situations in which shelters are necessary for affected animals. Management of animals during disasters is important not only to save animals, but also to save human lives.

The recent pandemic of COVID-19 is affecting humans as well as animals. Pets that are owned by COVID-19 positive patients have to be safely managed, and shelter medicine plays a key role in such care. Shelter medicine can be effectively employed in providing appropriate information on handling COVID-19 exposed pets and ensuring a safe environment for both animals and personnel. Shelter medicine is a comprehensive veterinary medicine that deals with many aspects of animal problems in the community. The needs of this new discipline are expanding and should be established in Japan for animal welfare and public health.

Bat (Order Chiroptera) is thought to be a natural reservoir of SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, which is currently a problem all over the world. Bat is also known as natural hosts for other important infectious disease agensts including Ebola virus and Nipah virus, and epidemiological studies on bats and researches on bat-specific viral tolerance systems are underway worldwide. This review describes that the pathogens detected in bats, the biological characteristics of bats, and where they can be seen. In addition, I explain that the epidemiological study on bats in the Philippines, which is a joint research in microbiology, epidemiology, and ecology.

Chalkbrood is a fungal disease affecting the larvae of western honeybee (Apis mellifera). It is known as one of the notifiable bee infectious diseases legislated by Japanese government. Ascosphaera apis (A. apis), an etiological fungus, is normally present in honeybee habitats. A. apis has extremely strong resistance against low water potential, thus it can survive for long periods in a tough dry environment. There are no approved pharmaceutical products against this disease in Japan. Moreover, few disinfection methods are applicable during the honey harvesting period. Therefore, to keep the number of A. apis low in beehives, it is important to conduct control measures based on risk factors associated with the disease onset. Epidemiologically, most cases of chalkbrood in Japan have been detected in the summer of Hokkaido (northern island of Japan), as the beekeepers in Honshu transfer their swarms to avoid the summer heat stress and to seek an adequate quantity of flowering plants for the nourishment of their bees. In an experimental infection, the larvae exposure to а low-temperature environment increased the chalkbrood incidence. Therefore, changing temperature conditions and summer bee swarm transfer to colder climate areas would be one of the risk factors for the chalkbrood. The identification of A. apis is mostly based on morphological observations. However, as the differentiation between A. apis from the other Ascosphaera fungi by this method is sometimes confusing, it is advisable to use molecular technique alongside. There are many constraints for establishing appropriate control measures against the infectious honeybee diseases including chalkbrood. Therefore, epidemiological studies need to be promoted from the viewpoint of healthy honey production and bee health improvement.

Classical swine fever (CSF) is a highly contagious disease in domestic pigs and wild boars that causes devastating economic losses. In September 2018, an outbreak of CSF reemerged in Japan after 26 years of absence of any case. After confirmation of the first case, disease control measures such as culling all pigs in infected farms and movement restriction on the surrounding farms were conducted. In addition, biosecurity measures were enhanced by constructing fences around the farms and oral vaccination were conducted to prevent the disease spread among wild boars. Despite conducting such measures, CSF continued to spread. The purpose of this study was to estimate economic losses when the CSF spread continues without any additional control measures such as vaccination to domestic pigs to provide information to discuss the necessity of applying such measures. To estimate the economic losses from the CSF outbreak in Japan, we simulated CSF infection in pig farms using a simple stochastic model assuming the CSF infection in wild boar spread concentrically and defined proportion of pig farms in the area with infected wild boar becomes infected. As a result, when the infection in wild boar spreads to a radius of 500 km, the total losses paid by the government amount to approximately 7 hundred million US$ which include compensation for infected farms and labor costs, and the loss due to the reduction in pork production would be about 1.3 billion US$. As this study was not considered effect of the vaccination to domestic pigs that started from the end of October 2019, the losses estimated in this study can be overestimated. Still, in the context of ongoing CSF epidemics, the importance of providing a prompt information to discuss the necessity of conducting additional control measures will be highlighted. This study will be helpful to predict the spread of an infectious disease and to estimate its cost during an epidemic.

Benzalkonium chloride (BC) is widely used in medical settings, food processing facilities, livestock farming, and industry. In this study, Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) resistance to BC was investigated by a screening test using stored laboratory strains. Results indicated that 3 of 219 tested strains demonstrated growth on plates containing 10µg/ml of BC. Therefore, BC-resistant Lm strains were confirmed to exist in Japan.

After the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) was announced by WHO on 30 January, the number of daily cases in Japan continued to increase and reached over 150 on 24 February. On 25 February, The Cluster Management Task Force (CMTF) was established under the Novel Coronavirus Expert Meeting of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Their mission was to 1) identify contacted persons by interviewing infected patients, 2) find infection cluster events, 3) identify risk factors causing cluster events, 4) announcing these factors to reduce cluster events. Professor Hiroshi Nishiura, an expert of theoretical epidemiology in Japan, took the lead in CMTF and provided evidence of strong heterogeneity of the number of secondary infections from a person infected with SARS-CoV2. This evidence supported the strategy of CMTF; suppressing epidemic by reducing the number of cluster events but not by drastic countermeasures such as city lockdown. In addition, CMTF found out that the three primary factors are the risk of causing cluster events. The three factors are closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings, and thereafter, called “Three Cs” and announced as a slogan to change people’s activity.