In 1948 (about a year after US President Harry S. Truman authorized the US National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council to organize the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission [ABCC]), the JNIH joined the research program and established branch laboratories within ABCC in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This cooperative program continued until April 1975, when the binational Radiation Effects Research Foundation was established with funding from the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare (currently, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare) and the US Department of Energy through the US National Academy of Sciences. The JNIH was renamed the National Institute of Infectious Diseases [NIID] in 1997.