ABSTRACT
The 1918 flu provides numerous lessons for examining the spread of infectious disease for the remainder of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. The commission of public health officials battling the flu in cities provided ample opportunities to consider strategies for containing the spread of infectious diseases such as the 1918 influenza. Struggles with infectious disease throughout the 1800s left much of the United States with public systems of varying degrees of efficiency. The late spring and summer of 1918, the incidents of flu began to decline at Funston and other bases in the United States, as the flu virus increasingly ran out of a population to which it could spread. As the summer progressed, public officials in the United States began receiving reports of the flu's impact throughout Europe, and anticipated that if it were to resurface in the United States, the flu would be devastating. The need to develop an infrastructure to address new public health challenges.
