Your beautiful eyes should never be ignored, especially if they feel differently somehow. They might feel itchy, they’re more watery, or they’re swollen . Either way, it could be an eye infection and if left untreated, it could lead to eye damage. Eye infections typically fall into three categories based on their cause and treated accordingly. The infection could be viral, bacterial, or fungal. Eye infections may come up in different ways, for instance, you can have symptoms in your conjunctiva, eyelid, or cornea.

A few of the common eye infections include:

1. Conjunctivitis

Also referred to as pinkeye, this infection affects the conjunctiva giving the eye a pink color. More often, it’s caused by bacteria or viral infections, but sometimes it is caused by exposing your body to allergic substances or irritants. There is a likelihood of getting this infection when the body is suffering from a cold. Signs and symptoms of conjunctivitis can include eyes turning red and itching a lot, feeling like there is sand in your eyes, frequent eye discharge, viral infection, watery or mucus-like discharge, bacterial infection, thin white, green or yellow discharge, and crusting of the eyelid.

2. Keratitis

Keratitis is an infection that affects the cornea and the causal agents include parasites, bacteria, or virus in water. The disease is common to individuals who wear contact lenses. Common signs and symptoms of keratitis and other frontal eye infections can include itching, pain, and sensation of foreign particles in the eyes, yellow discharge that might be crusty in the morning, uncontrollable tears, constant involuntary blinking, redness in the white part of the eye, and swollen eyelids

3. Sty or stye

This infection that emerges as painful bumps underneath your eyelid or at the base of your eyelashes. The condition occurs when the eye oil glands get infected with bacteria.

4. Signs and early warning symptoms of different eye infections

With the many different causes of eye infections, signs and symptoms are likely to vary from one infection to the other. However, what a person feels mostly depends on the area with the infection rather not from the causative agent. In many cases, infections that affect the retina, the blood vessels that feed the eye, and the optic nerve barely cause any pain. The typical symptoms are barred vision, which can be stopped, although never reversible. For this reason, it is recommended to carry out regular eye checkup. Among the most common symptoms of internal eye infection is floaters and tiny liquid fragments inside the eye. You are likely to see small bubbles or blurred spots falling in your line of vision. However, everyone has a few floaters, but you should be concerned when there is a sudden increase in them.

If eye infections are left untreated, severe complications may arise, such as damage of the retina, growth of scars, and cancer of the cornea that affect the proper vision. Many cases of eye infections are accompanied by diseases in other parts of the body. Some of these infections have apparent symptoms.