Symptoms of avian bird flu

I have a friend who is absolutely obsessed with the threat of an avian pandemic. She cannot get the symptoms of avian bird flu off of her mind. Every time she is sick, she compares her own maladies with a list of avian flu symptoms. The problem is that almost every complaint, from a mild headache to a life-threatening condition, can be one of the symptoms of avian flu. She thinks about it so much that she has worried herself sick. It is not an avian bird flu pandemic that threatens her health. It is her own neurotic worry. I tell her that she has nothing to worry about, but she will not listen to me. Although intellectually she knows that there is no reason to obsess over the symptoms of avian bird flu, nonetheless she persists. The reality is that she is unlikely to be one of the first people to get it. After all, she has very little contact with birds. If there is an avian flu pandemic, she will receive plenty of warning and be ready and prepared. She washes her hands almost religiously,which is really all that she can do to keep healthy. Nonetheless, she goes much further than that. People who are really paranoid about the symptoms of avian bird flu always take things way too far. My friend actually owns a gas mask, as well as a light dust mask, to protect herself against the spread of avian flu. Whenever there is something going around, she actually wears a mask to work! All I can say is that she must have a very tolerant boss. She actually has a checklist of the symptoms of avian bird flu up on her wall, and at the slightest complaint she compares her own symptoms to it. Whenever she suspects that she could possibly be sick, she starts to take avian flu virus medicine. Although there is no proof that this medicine works, nonetheless she pops the pills religiously. The real tragedy of this is not that she is wasting her time or her money, but that she is wasting her life. No matter how carefully she protect herself against the symptoms of avian bird flu, she only has a certain amount of time to live. Instead of going out there and enjoying her time on this earth, she worries so much about the symptoms of avian bird flu that it stifles her social life. She gets tension headaches, anxiety attacks, and other symptoms of neurotic worry. I need to get her to stop!

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