You must have often heard of people complaining about allergies or worse still you may have faced it yourself. However, you may still find allergies to be a strange and unfathomable disease. Despite being a common phenomenon very few have a thorough knowledge about allergies. Let us take a tour through the world of allergies and get to know more about them.

What are allergies?

Is there anything that most people find harmless but causes you to dread? If your dread is because of how hypersensitive you are to these things and the unnatural way your body reacts to them when you consume them, inhale them or even touch them, know that you are allergic to them. The various types of substances that cause irritation and adverse reactions are known as allergens. There are numerous types of allergens like animal dander, insect stings, certain food items, specific medicines, atmospheric conditions, synthetic fabric and many more. These vary widely from person to person. You may not be allergic to things I am allergic to.

History of allergies

The term allergy owes its origin to the Greek language. The word "allos", which means "other" and the word "ergon", which "work" have combined to coin the word allergy. A century ago, Clemens Von Pirquet, a pediatrician from Vienna had pioneered the idea of allergy. The number of people afflicted by allergies in the US today shoots up to above 50 million. It ranks sixth among the most popular diseases in America.

How does it happen?

You may be wondering as to how seemingly harmless substances can cause inflammation, reddening, swelling, etc. Our bodies are constituted in such a way that they can guard against various potential diseases with the help of the immune system. The immune system is established with the various vaccines that we take and it develops with the passage of time. The system learns to recognize foreign substances that may cause harm to the body. Often the system tends to mistake harmless substances as harmful ones and that is when the body reacts abnormally and becomes allergic to these substances.

Now that you have had an encounter with allergies in terms of knowing the disease more closely you can take various preventive measures to avoid allergies or may understand and undergo treatment if they are already tormenting you.

If you are thinking that allergy is only a simple disease, you may be quite wrong. You may be afflicted by only one or two types of allergies. This may lead you to feel that allergies are limited to only those types. However, if you take a look around and see other people suffering from various other allergies you will soon realize that allergies are definitely not as simple as they sound. You will be flabbergasted to know the variety of the types of allergies that occur.

Allergies can be roughly classified under three different categories. Almost all the varied kinds of allergies may be place under them. Let us take a look at the three different categories and the types that come under them.