Embarassingly enough, I spent a non-zero part of my childhood believing that fevers and flus were the same thing, likely due to my elementary school-aged self not having a tremendous grasp of how the human body’s immune system works. Later, I would learn that these two words are not synonyms. Instead, fever is a symptom of many varieties of illnesses, including influenza. Still, the two terms have long been associated in my mind, with the results of a recent study further emphasizing their connection.
This week, the journal Science published a paper that explored one potential health benefit of having a fever — with the big caveat that the study involved mice rather than humans. The study’s authors considered the differences between birds’ body temperatures and those of humans, noting that “the normal body temperature of avian hosts exceeds that of a typical human fever.”
In engaging in this research, the scientists involved sought to discover whether or not, as they phrased it, “elevated temperature itself is directly antiviral.” They modified a type of virus known as PR8 to create one that would thrive at higher temperatures akin to what it would experience in birds’ bodies. The mice which had a higher body temperature were able to resist the standard version of the virus but were affected by the version designed to be effective in birds.
This, in turn, led the papers’ authors to conclude that increases in body temperature can help the immune system fight off certain diseases. “The ~2°C increase in body temperature, which is similar to an everyday febrile response, transformed a normally severe or lethal challenge into mild disease,” the authors wrote.
Your Brain Can Anticipate Illness Around You
A new study explored how the brain and immune system work together“[A]t a molecular level, we’re quite unsure how temperature might be impacting viruses,” one of the paper’s authors, University of Cambridge professor Sam Wilson, told NPR. Seeking to gain a better understanding of that impact is what prompted this line of reaearch to begin with. It also raises a bigger question: is there something that these scientists learned that can be applied to better help our bodies fight off influenza?
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