Not long ago, I read an article about alternative health where someone with a serious disease was counseled to look upon it as a "blessing."

Your first reaction is probably the same as mine was -- what a stupid idea! How can cancer or heart disease be a blessing?

First off, let me say that I do believe that humanity's greatest strength is the ability to persevere in the face of problems and to turn negatives into positives -- lemons into lemonade.

So if you believe, as alternative health advocates do, that you do have some control over your health -- then any disease indicates that you need to make some kind of change in your life.

That may be a change in diet, reducing stress, etc. -- but if you can learn the lesson before the "teacher" disease kills you, you'll be healthier for having had the problem.

As I write, 105 people have died from bird flu from Indonesia to Turkey -- to alert humanity to the danger it's facing. We cannot raise them from the dead, but we can attempt to give meaning to their death by learning how to prevent more, and thereby making bird flu a blessing for survivors and our children.

The first step was taken about 5 months ago by President George W. Bush. As part of his request to Congress for 7 billion dollars to
fight bird flu, he wants to advance the technology of making vaccines so that they can be created and manufactured more quickly.

A company in Isreal had already started working on a "generic" flu vaccine. That is, it would train your immune system to target the universal genetic structure of all influenza viruses. They originally planned to do in 5 years. Now they're trying to finish before bird flu goes pandemic.

Those of us who live in the developed world must stop being so complacent.

Because long after bird flu is a boring chapter in history, we will be threatened by new diseases.

Most Americans have heard of Ebola, but are not aware of the many other emerging diseases we have discovered in the past 20 to 30 years. It's a long and scary list.

And although they all seem remote from us, they're all just one international jet flight away. They're no more remote than West Nile fever was before it started killing birds and people in Brooklyn in 1999.

We need to take care of our immune systems.

We need to better track viral infections in people. The developed world needs to make its expertise and resources available, and the developing world needs to make public healthcare and a medical infrastructure a higher priority.

The U.S. Center for Disease Control has done a terrific job at this for many years. It needs to expand its operations, the UN World Health Organization needs to expand and national health systems around the world need to do a better job of tracking and controlling disease threats.

We need to do a much better job of incorporating alternative health methods into standard medical care.

We need to stop counting on Tamiflu and start expanding the use of Vitamin C (especially injected ascorbate for serious illnesses),
curcumin, garlic, beta glucans and other supplements from mushrooms . . . for starters.

For poor countries it makes economic sense to make use of regional herbs and supplements over expensive drugs such as Tamiflu.

Also, a massive demand for effective herbs and substances should spur farmers in the developing world to raise those herbs in a sustainable fashion.

This would encourage good use of land and also bring cash income to the poor farmers, everybody else involved in the processing and shipping of the supplements and their communities.

The human race has survived and prospered by learning from its mistakes. A lot of people are going to die for the lessons we learn from the bird flu pandemic -- let's learn and apply as many of those lessons as possible.

We owe that to the dead and to our children.