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Why do we get a fever during infection?

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Video Transcript:
Hey guys. Today we’re going to talk about fevers during infections. It’s actually a pretty common question that shows up when I’m teaching classes as well, and so I thought I’d bring this up so that way we can speak more about it, that way we can really understand why a fever actually happens in an immune response. It actually is a systemic response to invading organisms, okay? It’s not caused by invading organisms.

Our body intentionally raises the core temperature, and that’s simply because the leukocytes and the macrophages are releasing pyrogens which increase the internal temperature. They release these pyrogens, letting the hypothalamus know that it wants to increase temperature in order to combat an invading organism. Our body actually benefits from having an increased temperature. It is with full intention with our immune responses that our immune response wants this to happen, because it actually kind of kneecaps a bacterial infection, or a microorganism infection to the point where it might actually be able to take an advantage of this infection and kill it before it spreads any further.

Basically, what increasing the temperature does is it allows for the liver and spleen to hold onto zinc and iron. What zinc and iron are beneficial for organisms or bacterial growth is that it actually assists that, okay? It allows for rapid growth of bacteria, so when the spleen and the liver are able to hold onto zinc and iron, it doesn’t allow bacteria to grow nearly as much, or nearly as rapidly would be more accurate.

Another thing that allows is increased temperatures allow for metabolic rate of tissues; it increases for metabolic rate increases, so that allows for a lot faster cell repair. When something is damaged, and the bacteria moves onto more healthy tissues because that’s what it likes to feedback off of, increased temperature allows for the increased metabolic rate of tissue repair, and it kind of follows in behind so that way we’re not causing any more damage, or we’re not leaving damaged cells just kind of unattended there.

So, those are the kind of things that a fever can help us. Now obviously, it can lead to a severe dehydration for prolonged infections, and so having a fever initially is very, very useful in order to kind of help the body fight organisms or microorganisms; however, prolonged infections and prolonged fevers can be very dangerous because of the severe dehydration that can precede that as well.

If you have any more questions about fevers during an infection, please email me or give me a shout-out on the page, and we’ll talk soon. Thanks, guys.

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