Vox Populi, here, starts a new portion. We like to call it Vox-Tech. Basically, it is a place where you, being a student/teacher/whatever in our institute, can tell us something interesting about a particular field of science (Some people call it PopSci) and if we find it interesting enough, we will tell the world about it. So, go on and write something. We might even treat you if you amaze us.
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One fine day, the mistress of evolution sat seaming in her courtyard. In her tinker-some best, she wondered what today. A fragrant breeze, the rustle of leaves, and that congenial stroke of inspiration, she conceived fever! With a grand flourish of her wand she had the next living moving thing to spike a modest rise in temperature as when any infection took seat. Little did she know then that that little whim would be such a hit in the ages to come. 600 million years have passed since, and the fashion is still in vogue. Come any infection, be it human, animal or plant, the organism spikes fever!
It was in 1st century AD that Celsus, a Roman scholar, despite being surrounded by Roman soldiers who wore sexy skirts and ambled around distracting gentle folks with that display of rippled manly thighs, had the focus of mind to notice beyond and club fever with three other signs, local redness, swelling and pain. These are the four cardinal signs of inflammation, the body’s response to any infection or trauma. With an addition of loss of function as the fifth sign – and the unfortunate restriction of man-skirts to Scotland, the firm association between fever and infection still holds today.
Evolution while a tinkerer, hates to hoard. Each organism is an essential minima. It doesn’t carry as baggage attributes that don’t benefit it in this struggle for existence. Anatomical features, physiological aspects, psychological quirks, all have a meaningful purpose in enabling the organism and the species to reproduce and survive. Enter man and he wonders, if so, then what good does fever do that evolution did not lose it despite the 600 million years of relationship it has had. Well, could it be that the rise in body temperature on infection helps the organism ward off the infecting agent, kill that irksome interfering microbes, be it bacteria, virus, protozoa or fungus?
Julius Wagner-Jauregg, other than having the misfortune of having been a life-long friend of Sigmund Freud, and an anti-Semite, the order of misfortunes with-standing, bagged the Nobel for medicine on 10th December, 1927, a decade right after he treated nine patients with neurosyphilis. Now neurosyphilis is a vintage disease, a relic of pre-antibiotic era, wherein tiny wriggly bacteria called Treponema pallidum pitch camp in one’s brain and go hiking; though this little adventure doesn’t bode well to the patient. There was no treatment to cure or stall this malady. Julius thought better and gave them malaria. Yes, you read that right. He infected them with malaria. Lo and behold, of the nine patients in his first trial in 1917, six got better. No kidding!
Julius Wagner was no run-of-the-mill mad scientist who just got lucky. There was a rationale to this radical trial. Malaria causes fever. Many including himself suspected whether this fever, the little whim of our evolutionary seamstress, could have the role in the clearance of infections.And as the story stands today, Shanon S.Evans of Rosewell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo published in Nature Review in July, 2015 that Immune system feels the heat. Fever affects every aspect of the body’s intricate immune defence, and in almost every case, improving its robustness. It’s so useful that lizards, which can’t raise their body temperature (courtesy being cold-blooded), spike it to fever range by behaviourally seeking warm-shelter upon infection. And MJ Kluger found that if you don’t let these lizards do so by artificially restraining them, or giving them aspirin which curiously makes them not seek hot spots (suggesting the mechanism for physiological and behavioural fever induction is the same), the lizards perish to the infection.
Now if that were the case, why on earth do we have paracetamol, aspirin, ibuprofen and the likes prescribed for fever? If fever fights infection, why do we relieve one of fever? Shouldn’t we let it wage on! But before that, what’s fever? Is any rise in body temperature fever, or there’s more to the mix? And how does the body rig up this association between infection and fever?
*for answers, and for a little bit about my bathroom, await the continuation, the PART-II of this long arduous monologue! Ciao.*
Written by Baba Yogesh
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