Danger of fever with the shivers

HAVING a moderate fever isn’t all that harmful to an otherwise healthy person. After all, it’s a natural defensive reaction by the body, as it works to battle infection.

However, if you get chills and shivers during a fever, you should take countermeasures, doctors say.

When immune cells detect invading bacteria or viruses, they trigger a chain reaction. Chemical messengers course through the body and alert the brain to the threat.

An area of the brain called the hypothalamus, which serves as the body’s thermostat, then shifts the set point of normal body temperature upward in order to destroy the invaders.

The greater the number of invaders, the more the hypothalamus turns up the heat.

As a “last line of defence”, says Dr Hanns-Christian Gunga, acting director of the Institute of Physiology at Charite university hospital in Berlin, it initiates what’s known as ‘shivering thermogenesis’.

This means that practically all of the skeletal muscle groups are involuntarily driven to contract synchronously, producing heat.

“A person’s entire body chatters during chills,” Gunga says, but the body can’t keep this up for long, because chills expend an extremely high amount of energy.

“Sugar stores are quickly depleted,” Gunga notes.

So if you have a fever and get chills, you should act. Your best bet is to take a fever-reducing medication, which prevents the hypothalamus from getting signals to keep turning up the heat. – dpa