I wanted to write this earlier, but my body wasn’t cooperating. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been suffering through a high fever, cough and the aches caused by the respiratory syncytical virus (RS-virus). The only reason I know what virus has caused my misery is that my doctor tested me for it.

It seems that RS-virus is one of the more watched contagious illnesses in Japan. Every winter, it makes people sick and hospitalizes thousands of infants. Most adults can shake off the fever and cough with medication. But the virus for babies under a year old causes enough irritability that they will stop feeding and have to be admitted to a hospital for intravenous feeding.

The reason that I know all of this is because there are hundreds of medical studies published in Japanese and English about the costs of RS-virus in Japan. When I first looked up what RS-virus was, the first phrase in the search engine to come up was “RS-virus Japan.”

Now that I am feeling a little better, I can’t help but think about how much energy the Japanese state has put into controlling the spread of communicable diseases. When severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and H1N1 influenza break out in Japan, public health officials don’t fool around. Following advice from health officers from the Infectious Disease Surveillance Center and the American Center for Disease Control, they go to incredible lengths to prevent contaminative people and things from entering the country.

This attention to biosecurity dates back to the 1870s. In the early years of modern shipping and border control, some of the most difficult places that Japanese government officials had to regulate were the treaty ports of Hyogo, Nagasaki and Yokohama. Officials soon came to realize that the most difficult things to manage were not the people and the objects that they could tax through customs and immigration. The most difficult things to manage were microscopic.

With modern shipping came the increased spread of communicable diseases that took advantage of the cramped quarters of ships and poor public hygiene systems in ports. With outbreaks of typhus, cholera and diphtheria, which sometimes killed tens of thousands of people per month, the Japanese government, as early as the late-1870s, began to organize and improve its public health system through programs such as promoting the cleaning of toilets and the construction of sewage lines.

The regulation of the ports to keep diseases, and their human and non-human carriers out is something that is — has been — generally approved of and highly publicized in most countries. On the one hand, people complain vigorously if there are outbreaks of contagious diseases from external sources. On the other, people say very little or think very little about the incredible amount of resources that are spent in maintaining a robust biosecurity system.

I never thought much about this until I got sick. I normally take being sick graciously, but this time I felt bitter about all the sick people I’ve been around and how their liberty to be sick caused me to suffer.

In Japan, many biosecurity laws designed to stop the spread of communicable diseases, like tuberculosis, have been in effect since the beginning of the 20th century. For example, the Leprosy Prevention Law, which was around from 1953 to 1996, allowed governments to remove people who contracted the Mycobacterium bacterium to national leprosaria. Until recently, doctors were required to alert local governments of people who contracted HIV and were believed to be of high risk of infecting others.

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