It's hard enough to bid goodbye to the summer, 'hello' to the books, and to realize that school has begun again. It's doubly hard when there are at least as many kleenex boxes as books to greet. Harvard has its annual cold.

"It's a pretty predictable event," Dr. Sholem Postel, associate director of University Health Services (UHS) said yesterday. "We see this initial wave of respiratory disease every year right after school starts," he added.

Postel attributed the yearly outbreak to the various strains of virus students bring back from different parts of the country, but added he did not think it was serious.

Meanwhile, sniffles mingle with hisses in lecture halls and few seem immune. "I had a cold last week, my roommate has one now. Even two of my professors were sick," John Van Wye '81 said yesterday.

"Everyone in my English 10 section was sniffling," Margaret Profet '80, who lives in Lowell House, said yesterday. "Finally, I started sniffling, too," she added.

Not everyone is miserable, however, as local merchants cash in on student symptoms. Contac and Sucrets are in high demand. "Everyone who came in today had a sore throat," a clerk in Cahaly's on Mt. Auburn St. said yesterday.

Contagion has even spread as far north as the Quad. One South House junior said yesterday, between coughs, "It's really not so bad--it makes it harder to taste the food."