Food Hygiene and Important Future Tasks

It is a pleasure for me to accept the kind invitation of the President of the Japanese Veterinary Medical Association, Dr. Sugiyama, which was extended to me due to the arrangement by Dr. Ozawa, and I consider it a great honor to speak to you on the occasion of your Annual Meeting as an official speaker from Germany. Thus, I am standing here, in a way, as an ambassador of the German medicine and veterinary medicine and, in particular, of food hygiene which has been developed on the basis of it, and I would like to refer to the traditional friendship between our countries and to give, at the same time, new impulses to the collaboration in our field. In this connection, I remember with pleasure one of my predecessors in this function, Prof. Dr. and Dr. h.c. J. Fortner, who maintained close connections in particular to the Animal Health Institute and who showed to me with pride his appointment by you as an Honorary Member back in the sixties. As the present President of the German Federal Health Office, which is located in Berlin, I wish to remind you of Robert Koch and his disciple Kitasato, two internationally highly estimated specialists in the field of infectious diseases, who established the traditional collaboration in the field of the control of infectious diseases in 1885-1892. In July of this year we will celebrate the centenary of the Robert Koch Institute of this Office in the presence of representatives of the famous Kitasato Institute. Finally, I would like to inform you that I am one of the sponsors of the Japanese-German Centre which was established in the presence of the former Japanese Prime Minister, Mr. Nakasone, in Berlin in 1986. At present I am chairman of the working group "Medicine and Biotechnology" of that Centre. I hope that my stay in your country will also be beneficial for the collaboration with the Japanese veterinary medicine under the roof of this Centre in Berlin. You may imagine that the German population and the people of Berlin are happy about the reunification and the