History teaches that population-wide behavioral patterns change infrequently, and slowly. After all, little changed in how we behaved after the last global disease disruption, the flu pandemic of 1968, and perhaps most dramatically, societal behavioral changes after the 1918 flu pandemic were few and far between. What is most striking about how we act in the future is how similar our behavior looks to what it was like in the past, and that is true whether we have lived through a national trauma or not.
What did change after the 1918 flu pandemic was our appreciation of the need to move beyond considering health as an exclusively individual responsibility, and to set up the structures needed to help promote health collectively. A number of countries created health ministries after the 1918 pandemic and centralized healthcare delivery schemes, which unfolded in different ways in different nations. Russia, for example, was first to follow the 1918 flu pandemic with public healthcare, funded through state-run insurance. The UK, France, and Germany did much the same soon after. In 1922, the League of Nations Health Committee and Health Sections were established—forerunners of the World Health Organization (WHO).
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