And — for allergy sufferers — here’s the good news: Second Genome has appeared to isolate a link between allergic diseases and the bacteria living in your gut. What it means is that you may one day buy a drug from Johnson & Johnson that injects bacteria into your body to prevent allergies or minimize allergic reactions. Instead of buying an over-the-counter antihistamine drug during the peak of the pollen vortex, you‘d buy a bacterial therapy pioneered by a microbiome company.

And for that, you can blame the polar vortex—the extreme cold system that repeatedly hovered over much of the United States this year—along with the rest of this winter's brutal weather. Those cold snaps helped spawn a spring allergy season so intense that it already has its own headline-ready nickname: the "pollen vortex."

Polar Vortex to Pollen Vortex? Experts say Spring allergies could be terrible due to record snow.