Hirokazu Togo came to Cornell’s MPH Program on a Fulbright scholarship, on a two-year sabbatical from his position as Senior Environmental Health Officer for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. After graduating as first-ever valedictorian of a Cornell MPH class, in May 2019, Hirokazu returned to his position in Tokyo—now, with greater impact, and greater responsibility.

Hirokazu now takes a lead role in revising Tokyo’s Ordinance for Enforcement of Food Sanitation Act. Through one such revision, Hirokazu has ensured that Tokyo’s food businesses will implement Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) systems, which he became familiar with as an MPH student. These systems focus more on preventing food-borne illness before food can be contaminated, while the previous ordinance in Tokyo focused more on testing final food products, which had limited capacity to prevent foodborne disease outbreaks. Hirokazu says he deepened his understanding of HACCP through Cornell’s MPH Program and was able to bring this directly to his work and public impact in Japan.

When the ordinance is adopted, all food businesses in Tokyo, from restaurants to super markets to conveniences stores, will need to document protocols and procedures for handling food, washing hands, and other foodborne illness prevention measures. “This is a big difference,” says Hirokazu. While food safety inspections used to focus more on physical facilities themselves, they’ll now focus more on the processes outlined and monitored in these documents.

Immediately after returning to Tokyo last July, Hirokazu proposed a project that would analyze three years of existing foodborne disease outbreak data from investigation reports in Tokyo, to help determine the “root causes” of these outbreaks. He learned these skills as an MPH student, he says. Through this research, Hirokazu was able to provide solid evidence for what was already suspected—people tend not to wash their hands often enough, and tend to go to work while they’re sick. The MPH Program helped him develop more of a systems-based approach—“systems thinking is one of the things I have in my mind always, now,” says Hirokazu, “and one of the reasons I did the root cause analysis.” He believes that these findings will be especially important with the introduction of HACCP.

As a Masters student with the MPH Program, Hirokazu spent the summer working with the New York State Department of Health’s Bureau of Communicable Disease Control, publishing two policy assessments of their centralized case interview system for local health departments who contact people with reported enteric disease. Based on this experience, he chose his capstone project that compared the foodborne disease surveillance systems of the United States and Japan, applying Listeria monocytogenes as a case study, and recommending four new actions to the Japanese government.

In February, Hirokazu gave a lecture to environmental health officers across Tokyo about what he learned at Cornell, focused on the takeaways about this capstone project. The lecture was so popular, he was asked to deliver it a second time to environmental health officers who couldn’t make the first. The participants, Hirokazu says, called the ideas “eye-opening.”

He hopes to continue to pursue his career as a food safety expert by leveraging the knowledge and experience he gained in the MPH program.