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If you want to trust you and your family's health to the government -- you deserve what happens to you. The United States Homeland Security Council in early May 2006 released a 233 page report called the Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan. In many ways, it's very comprehensive -- and it's a great foundation for protecting ourselves, our families, our nation and our world. But it leaves out a huge portion of the solution to bird flu -- "alternative" medicine. There are substances which could greatly increase the virus-zapping power of immune systems of people around the world -- at a small fraction of the cost of expensive vaccines and Tamiflu. They could be easily administered by patients and family members. They could easily be distributed and used by everybody from wealthy countries to poor rural farmers. They are not magic bullet, 100% guaranteed cure-alls -- but neither are vaccines or Tamiflu. They are not the only useful alternative medicine weapons against bird flu -- not by a long shot -- but some powerful substances could not be produced or grown in the mass quantities needed to take care of billions of people around the world. I'm not saying these replace professional medical care -- but in a full-blown bird flu pandemic, professional medical care will be in short supply even in the developed world. I'm talking about: Vitamin C Selenium Curcumin Vitamin C (ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate) directly protects your body from the destructive free radicals generated by any infection. Bird flu causes hemorrhages under your skin and bleeding from the nose and gums -- in effect, bird flu gives you scurvy. Vitamin C chemically protects you by giving up its own electrons to destroy the free radicals damaging you. Right now, about half of all Americans take a Vitamin C supplement. That's the good news. Unfortunately, when they come down with a cold or the flu, they don't take enough. They drink some extra glasses of Vitamin C (pitiful) and take a few extra capsules of Vitamin C a day (like removing flood water with a teaspoon) and then complain that it doesn't work. Even against a cold, and certainly against a more powerful infection such as bird flu, you need to take in massive amounts of Vitamin C, often enough (at least once an hour), on a continuous basis. This is because the Vitamin C is used up as it fights the virus. But if you take enough of it, it does reduce the infection. When you're sick, you don't want to take Ester-C because you want the full effects RIGHT NOW! Against bird flu, shots of Vitamin C would be even more effective, if you can find a medical professional to administer them. Ascorbate would not be expensive to produce in massive quantities and distributed to medical treatment facilities around the world, in both injectable and tablet form. Selenium is considered one of the most important trace minerals. It's necessary for production of the antioxidant glutathione. Studies have shown that people around the world who live in selenium-deficient soil areas are a lot less healthy than people who eat food raised on soil containing selenium. Selenium stimulates the phagocytes to destroy invading germs. It increases T-cells and improves the functioning of your thymus gland, which also improves your immune system. 200 mcg of selenium increases NK cell activity. Many health care professionals recommend selenium for HIV+ patients. Curcumin is the active ingredient of tumeric, the yellow spice found in Indian food. It's made up of circuminoids, which have antioxidant, antibacterial and anti-inflammatory effects. The beauty of using curcumin against bird flu is that it's a natural protease inhibitor. This means it blocks the bird flu H5N1 virus from entering the cells of your respiratory system. If the virus cannot take over your cells, it cannot replicate itself by millions and is helpless. To take over one of the cells in your respiratory tract, the virus needs the proteasome enzyme complex in cells. Curcumin inhibits this complex (which is also called the MAPK p38 system.) I know that's technical -- but the important thing is that with this proteasome enzyme complex in your cells inhibited, the bird flu virus cannot take over your cells. It's like armoring a safe so that the drill a burglar uses cannot make a hole into it. If the bird flu virus cannot enter your cells, it cannot take them over. It cannot replicate itself throughout your body. Your immune system soon finds and destroys it. You never even know you were infected. There're probably many companies in India that would be happy to manufacture even more curcumin than they do now, for their domestic tumeric market. If the governments of the world would spend just a small fraction of the money now going toward a bird flu vaccine (which will be 6 months behind the appearance of a contagious bird flu virus) and Tamiflu (which has a long list of side effects and which will be difficult to properly administer and which bird flu may have already developed resistance to), on making large quantities of these three substances to their citizens, the world would be much safer against bird flu. And everybody's immune systems would be better able to defeat all infections.
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