Fever: A Foe or a Friend?

With the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s important to ask two basic important questions: 1. What is a virus, 2. How a healthy body reacts to the virus.

What is a virus? 

A virus is a kind of microorganisms that are not capable of replicating themselves on their own. They need to have a host. They could be wrapped in an RNA or a DNA. There are three goals of a virus once it’s inside a host cell: 

• 1. It shuts down a host cell’s normal function, 
• 2. It hi-jacks the cell’s protein-making machinery,
• It instructs the host cell to use its protein to make copies of the virus that invaded. 

Think of it as invading terrorists. They take over a city. They stop all food production and other normal activities of the city. After that, the terrorist begins indoctrinating other citizens to become terrorists like themselves. Covid-19 like other corona viruses targets the respiratory system. When the virus has successfully colonized a cell, the virus fills the cell so much with viruses that it bursts the cell to destruction.

How a Healthy Body Reacts to Virus

There are numerous defense mechanisms that a healthy body reacts to viral infection. In this article, I’m going to focus on fever as a defense. 

When the cells in the body detect hijacking of sort, it raises its temperature. We are familiar with this as a fever. Medically, only those above 38 Celsius is considered “significant.” The body does this to prevent the virus from replicating like crazy. Don’t you know that the temperature below 37 Celsius is the perfect temperature that a virus replicates? Thus the body raises its temperature knowing that it destroys any microbial activity. 

That fact alone makes me wary of the knee-jerk reaction in treating fever, namely, taking paracetamol to lower the body temperature. Drinking paracetamol or any medicine that lowers the body temperature is counter-intuitive to what your body is trying to do. If you are scared of brain damage, brain damage does not even occur unless the fever is over 42% C.

In my next article, I will discuss why eating a healthy balanced diet is so important in fighting infections. Do you know that immunoglobulins or what is commonly called antibodies is a protein? 

References:

1. Coronaviruses: An Overview of Their Replication and Pathogenesis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4369385/
2. Chapter 49Nonspecific Defenses https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK8348/
3. Viral Highjackers https://www.teachengineering.org/lessons/view/duk_virus_mary_less