President Bush, perhaps the most physically fit president of the past century, took two steps toward improving the nation's health Tuesday.

The president outlined a $7.1 billion strategy to ward off the threat of pandemic flu. The best development in the proposal is Bush's decision to include $2.8 billion to speed the development of new technologies and vaccines to fight against such threats as the bird flu now spreading around the world.

Critics say the plan does too little, too late, but the political will needed to justify the expenditure has emerged only in the past year. The avian-flu outbreak coupled with the 2004 flu vaccine debacle is creating a political opportunity to reduce a serious threat.

Flu vaccine technology hasn't advanced since the 1950s, and the president's strategy should enable the nation in the years to come to develop effective vaccines in a matter of weeks instead of months. That development would greatly reduce the number of deaths from a deadly virus.

At the same time, Bush took the opportunity to be a good role model, encouraging Americans who are at risk (especially those 65 and older) to get their seasonal flu shots now to ward off the threat of a serious attack on their health. "I got mine," said the 59-year-old president, echoing the thoughts of Dr. Roger Baxter, chief of infectious diseases for the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Region. Baxter, in an accompanying article on this page, warns that too many people this fall are focusing on the threat of avian flu and neglecting the more immediate danger of this year's seasonal flu. Nearly 40,000 Americans die every year during a normal flu season.

It's far too early for people to become too worked up over the threat of avian flu. Only 62 people have died from it worldwide in the past three years, and none has contracted the virus from another human. It's possible that the virus may never develop into a pandemic strain akin to the "Spanish flu" that killed 50 million worldwide in 1918.

But eventually, over a period of years, experts predict that one of the trillions of viruses will mutate into a strain that will result in pandemic flu. Unless Bush's strategy goes into effect, the nation will be woefully unprepared. If an outbreak were to occur today, the number of potentially effective vaccines would disappear overnight, creating the potential for widespread panic. Worse, using a vaccine on a limited number of people would make the flu strain more resistant to anti-viral drugs, creating an even more deadly disease.

The technology for creating more effective vaccines has not advanced because the industry is not particularly profitable, given the nature of its single-dose cures and liability issues.

President Bush's strategy includes a call for liability protection for drug companies and funds to develop new vaccine technology so that by 2010 every American would have access to an effective vaccine within six months of the beginning of a pandemic.

After years of rolling the dice, hoping that health officials' fears wouldn't become reality, the president has taken the necessary step toward eliminating the future threat of a mass killer.