Past, present and future of travel medicine in Japan

SummaryAt present, more than 17 million Japanese travel overseas annually, and one out of seven Japanese now travel abroad. Accordingly, an increasing number of these travelers contract diseases, but the practice of travel medicine is not common in Japan yet. However, travel medicine societies and the like have been established in Japan since the late 1990s, and Japanese medical professionals are becoming increasingly interested in this field of medicine. In this paper, the past, present and future of travel medicine in Japan is reviewed.