WHEN you are ill, having a fever is not necessarily a bad thing. Now we know a little more about why: an elevated body temperature helps the immune system identify the cause of an infection and then eradicate it, say Sharon Evans and colleagues at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York.
The team replicated the effects of a fever in mice by keeping them at 39.5 °C. This doubled the number of lymphocytes passing through the lymph nodes, which is where the immune system checks which lymphocytes recognise any infective agents. Those that do are rapidly multiplied…
