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When winter colds and flu finally stop bothering us, but we still find ourselves sneezing, we always want to know, "Is this a cold or an allergy?" Finding out whether your symptoms are caused by a cold or allergy is the first step to finding relief, and here’s how to tell. Colds are contagious and are caused by one of more than 200 viruses. You can’t catch allergies, which are triggered by allergens, prompting your immune system to overreact.
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Problem: drug companies probably won’t make it – Scientists have now deciphered the instruction manual for the common cold, meaning we will be able to invent medicines to cure it, but the drug companies probably won’t bother to develop them since there’s not enough profit in it.

In an effort to confront our most familiar malady, a multi-institutional team of researchers reports the sequences for all of the 99 known strains of cold virus. The work to sequence and analyze the cold virus genomes lays a foundation for understanding the virus, its evolution and three-dimensional structure and, most importantly, for exposing vulnerabilities that could lead to the first effective cold remedies.
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The advice to ?feed a cold, starve a fever? may be right after all, researchers have discovered. Until now, most doctors and nutritionists have rejected it as myth. But Dutch scientists have found that eating a meal boosts the type of immune response that destroys the viruses responsible for colds, while fasting stimulates the response that destroys the bacterial infections responsible for most fevers.

?To our knowledge, this is the first time that such a direct effect has been demonstrated,? says Gijs van den Brink of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam.
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