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People sometimes confuse allergies with colds. Allergies are typically seasonal, although allergies to molds, dust, and pets can occur year-round. Fever rarely accompanies an allergy attack, and while allergy symptoms can be extremely annoying and fatiguing, you're unlikely to experience that overall sick feeling that often occurs with a cold. Although the sneezing and runny nose that allergies can cause mimic the symptoms of a cold, intensely itchy eyes and nose are nearly always a sign of allergy.
Perhaps most telling is the duration: an allergic reaction to something you are only momentarily exposed to (say, someone's dog or cat) will last at most a day or two, although if the allergen is omnipresent the symptoms can persist for many weeks. A cold, on the other hand, usually lasts for seven to ten days. About one-quarter of cold victims have symptoms for two weeks or longer, and an unfortunate 10 percent are plagued for three weeks or more, even if no complications develop. Still others complain that they seem to get one cold after another, perhaps because they have temporarily exhausted their immunological defenses.
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Anti-Infectives
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