Pharmacy Surveillance Seasonal Archives

Season-by-season records

This archive gathers the pharmacy surveillance daily reports produced across five consecutive influenza seasons, from 2009/2010 through 2013/2014. Each seasonal set was compiled from participating pharmacies' anti-influenza drug dispensing figures and broken down for review at the prefecture and designated-city level.

The reports were part of the broader pharmacy surveillance effort described on the About Pharmacy and Pharmacy Report pages, contributing one channel among several used for early detection of infectious disease activity in Japan.

The seasonal archives presented here offer a longitudinal view of influenza activity as reflected through pharmacy dispensing data. By tracking anti-influenza drug purchases across consecutive seasons, public health analysts can observe patterns in when respiratory illness peaks, how intensely it spreads, and which regions experience earlier or later outbreaks. This kind of surveillance complements traditional clinical reporting by capturing signals from individuals who may not visit a doctor, providing a broader and sometimes earlier window into community-level transmission dynamics. Each archived season represents a complete cycle of data collection, from the first autumn uptick through the spring decline.

The prefecture and designated-city breakdowns within these reports allow for meaningful geographic comparison of influenza timing and intensity. Because dispensing data flows from pharmacies in real time, the resulting daily estimates can reveal regional disparities that might otherwise be masked in aggregated national figures. Public health officials can use these granular views to tailor local response measures, allocate resources, and communicate risk more precisely to communities. The consistency of the methodology across all five seasons ensures that trends observed from one year to the next are attributable to genuine epidemiological variation rather than changes in how the data were gathered or interpreted.

Pharmacy-based surveillance holds a distinctive place in the broader influenza monitoring landscape. Unlike syndromic surveillance drawn from emergency department visits or school absenteeism, drug dispensing records capture a population that has already made a healthcare-seeking decision at the pharmacy counter. This makes the signal particularly relevant for understanding treatment-seeking behavior during influenza season. The daily cadence of these reports provides a high-resolution picture that weekly or monthly summaries cannot offer, enabling analysts to pinpoint the exact week of peak activity and track the speed of epidemic spread with greater confidence.

For researchers and public health practitioners, this archive serves as a valuable reference dataset spanning multiple seasons of varying severity and strain composition. Comparing a mild season against a severe one, or a season dominated by one influenza type versus another, can yield insights into how the virus behaves under different conditions and how populations respond. The archived reports also provide a baseline against which current and future seasons can be measured, helping to distinguish typical seasonal variation from anomalies that warrant closer investigation. Together, these records underscore the enduring value of community-level pharmaceutical data in building resilient influenza surveillance systems.

Regional coverage

Each seasonal archive listed figures for all 47 prefectures — from Hokkaido and Aomori through Okinawa — alongside separate breakdowns for Japan's designated cities, such as Sapporo, Sendai, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, and Fukuoka.

Related resources

For map-based visualizations referenced alongside these seasonal figures, and for the most recently compiled pharmacy daily report, see the Pharmacy Report page. Background on the pharmacy surveillance methodology is available via About Pharmacy.