The journal was established in July 1878 as the
Bulletins of the Public Health under the
National Quarantine Act of April 29, 1878, issued by the
Supervising Surgeon-General at the time,
John Maynard Woodworth. This act requested weekly reports of epidemic disease infections to be forwarded to Washington by the American consulates abroad. Publication was suspended after 46 issues on May 24, 1879 as a byproduct of the creation of the
National Board of Health and its takeover of the Quarantine Act responsibilities. During this period, the Board of Health instead published the reports in its
National Board of Health Bulletin. The responsibility for the Quarantine Act returned to the Surgeon General in 1883, and in 1887 the journal resumed publication as the
Weekly Abstract of Sanitary Reports. The journal stopped publishing morbidity and mortality statistics in 1950 when these stats were transferred to
MMWR. In 1952,
PHR absorbed three other journals, the
CDC Bulletin, the
Journal of Venereal Disease Information, and
Tuberculosis Control. In January 1918, a case of influenza in Haskell County, Kansas was diagnosed by local doctor Loring Miner. Miner published about the case in the April 1918
Public Health Reports. This is believed to be the first documented case of the
global influenza pandemic of 1918. Following this first publication about the global influenza pandemic of 1918, the journal published extensively about emerging viral epidemics, including about COVID-19. == Editors in Chief ==