Environmental Risks

Takatorige, Toshio; Hirose, Yukio; Nagamatsu, Shingo

The government countered by setting the Factory Act to protect the factory workers and building health centers around the nation. After World War II, the government set the Labor Standards Act and the Industrial Safety and Health Act to further protect workers. The health centers organized themselves to function as central establishments for tuberculosis management and patient control. As a result, the number of tuberculosis patients has dropped in Japan who is now close to a low TB burden country. The world, however, still carries 2-3 billion tubercle bacilli patients, and in the year 2015, there were about 10.4 million new patients and about 1.4 million deaths; it is still a disease with high concerns. Recently immigrants and refugees from high tuberculosis burden countries into advanced countries with low burden increased the number of infections in advanced countries, and the situation is calling for precaution and countermeasures. In fact, major cities of New York, San Francisco, and London faced the comeback of the patient counts in the 1980s and have enhanced their countermeasures. In Japan, among the patients in their twenties, over 60% are now foreign nationals (MHLW 2016) . If the number of foreign labor continues to increase, the country has to be concerned of the comeback, like European and American countries, and it has to keep tight control on tuberculosis.