Greetings from the New Editor-in-Chief

Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine (EHPM), an official international journal of the Japanese Society of Hygiene (JSH), was initially published in 1996 and has developed as the leading journal in the fields of environmental health and preventive medicine.

A couple of special events have taken place in the history of EHPM: the first was the change of publisher to Springer in 2008, and the second involved registration of EHPM with MEDLINE in 2010. In addition, EHPM established a China Office managed by Prof. Peiyu Wang M.D., Ph.D., Professor and Chair of the Department of Social Medicine and Health Education, Peking University School of Public Health, to encourage the submission of manuscripts from eastern Asia, especially China.

Since April of 2012, Prof. Chiharu Tohyama, Ph.D., Laboratory of Environmental Health Sciences, CDBIM, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, was the President of JSH. He stated, “It is important for the future development of JSH to acknowledge previous beneficial practices and continue to implement an efficient organization, as well as utilize sound management for the consideration of ideas (‘Consider’) and the performance of new (‘Challenge’) and enterprising (‘Create’) research. I would like to make this “3C” approach into a motto and to advance it during this term.”

On the basis of the President’s statement, EHPM will also consider, challenge and create many new things. For example, we will apply to the Web of Science to obtain the journal’s impact factor in order to develop a much higher distribution of our journal and encourage the submission of manuscripts from all over the world.

The ecological problems facing the earth, weather and human health have increased in recent years. We as medical and environmental researchers have to solve these problems using our armament of experimental techniques and epidemiological wisdom. Furthermore, we have to distribute our important results to the world. EHPM will be a valuable and powerful tool to declare and discuss issues regarding environmental health and preventive medicine, as expressed in the title of the journal.

We hope to advance in union with all international readers, researchers and people who have an interest in environmental health and preventive medicine. It is also important that we collaborate with these individuals to make EHPM an excellent and significant journal in this field.

We welcome opinions and comments on EHPM. Please feel free to contact us at anytime.

We hope all individuals related to these scientific fields focus attention on EHPM and collaborate to develop our journal.

Editor-in-Chief: Takemi Otsuki, M.D., Ph.D.

Associate Editor-in-Chief: Takahiko Katoh, M.D., Ph.D.