How does your body make a fever?

Moment Of Um

Lemonada Media

Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2024

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our body has lots of ways to fight off the germs that make us sick. One of those ways is to crank up our internal temperature to make it too hot for harmful bacteria to survive. This is called a fever. How do our bodies reach those hot fever temperatures? We asked physician Dr. Joe Alcock to help us find the answer. Got a burning question? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll help find an answer that’s a real fever reliever! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.
0:05.3	Answering those questions that make you go, um, um, um, moment of um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Goldfield.
0:27.9	Um.
0:28.4	Um.
0:30.6	I was sick last week.
0:35.3	Normally when I'm sick, I just get some sniffles and need to drink lots of water
0:39.6	and take a nap. This time, though, I had a slight fever for two whole days. It was only a few
0:46.2	extra degrees over my usual healthy body temperature of 98.6. But wow, did it feel hot? Even in shorts and a t-shirt with the air conditioner blasting, it felt like I was wrapped in a heated blanket,
1:00.6	or floating in a steamy hot spring, or wearing a onesie made out of cheese fondue.
1:06.7	Not a fun time, but I did cool down and feel much better after a couple of days.
1:12.1	In between cold showers and bowls of ice cream, though, I got curious.
1:17.0	How does my body turn up its temperature with a fever?
1:20.7	My buddy Orion was wondering about this too, so I asked a doctor to tell me all about it.
1:30.2	Hi, my name is Orion.
1:33.0	I'm from Portland, Oregon.
1:35.7	And my question is, how do our bodies make a fever?
1:42.4	When we get sick, our bodies change our internal thermostat so that our body temperature
1:49.5	actually goes up.
1:51.1	I am Joe Alcock, MD.
1:53.6	I am a professor of emergency medicine at the University of New Mexico, and I work in the ER
1:59.9	there if a normal body temperature is thought to be about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, a fever
2:08.0	would be over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 100.3, or 101, or 102, or even hotter than that.
	...

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