Lessons From an Early-stage Epidemiological Study of Minamata Disease.

Abstract

The Revisit series in this issue introduced the article by Kitamura and colleagues.1 Dr. Shoji Kitamura, born in 1915, was a medical doctor and a professor of Department of Public Health in the Medical School at Kumamoto University when Minamata disease happened. The article summarized findings from a very-early-phase epidemiological study conducted by researchers from Kumamoto University immediately after the Minamata disease incident was officially recognized on May 1, 1956. The epidemiological study was very well-conducted in a timely manner and the article was available as early as January 1957 in an academic journal published by the Medical School at Kumamoto University. This is a very influential report that demonstrated associations between fish intake and the Minamata disease after careful descriptive and analytical epidemiological studies. Although the Japanese society should have taken some actions to prevent the disease with the evidence that a research group at Kumamoto University had at that time, the pollution was not stopped until 12 years had passed since the official identification in 1956. Moreover, the struggle with Minamata disease is still in progress. This unfavorable response by the Japanese society could partly be explained by the important economic role of the causative factory at that time, when Japan had recorded a trade deficit since the end of the Second World War.2 Plastic products of the factory were key Japanese exports helping to reduce this deficit. In this commentary, after introducing the study by Kitamura and colleagues, I discuss the potentials of epidemiology, as well as consequences on public health that occurred when we did not follow the findings from the epidemiological study.