Fever and Flu

Spreading potentially lethal pathogens, influenza virus particles (brown) invade cilia (blue) in the airways of the human lung.
Image by Karsten Schneider/Science Photo Library


It turns out, the flu virus does not like heat and humidity. Which explains why we don't see flu in the summer months.
It also explains the fever. What a miracle our body is! When confronted with a flu virus, our bodies increase our temperature to kill off the virus. Pretty smart.
Its a myth that you should either starve or feed a fever or cold. The main thing you can do is not put your body through additional stress - don't overeat or undereat. Make sure your body has what it needs to concentrate on killing those little viruses and stay calm. its a combination of the heat and our immune system that eventually kills the virus. If you have digestive issues along with the flu, the food you eat should, obviously, be easier to digest. At the least, make sure you get plenty of fluids.
It makes sense to me that you might want to allow yourself to have a bit of a fever since that means your body is fighting. I understand anything over 103 in an adult, however, is too high. And, you shouldn't have a fever more than a couple days. Anything longer and it might indicate you need the help of a doctor to kill the virus. (I don't know what they do, though).

How the flu virus works

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Agence France-Presse | 04/30/2009 1:12 AM

PARIS - The influenza virus is a tiny, redoubtable foe that survives by stealth and sheer numbers.

Seen through an electron microscope, it resembles a spiky ball, comprising a protective shell studded with rods. It measures around 100 nanometres (100 billionths of a metre, 0.000004 of an inch) across, which is about a thousand times smaller than a bacterium.

Because it is so minute, the virus is unable to carry around the enzyme toolkit that it needs to reproduce. Instead, it hijacks the machinery of cells in the throat, nose and lungs to do this.

It first enters the nose or mouth, inhaled in droplets expelled by a cough or a sneeze by an infected person.

A virus can also survive on surfaces for up to 72 hours, depending on the type of surface, temperature and humidity.

This means the virus can picked up on the fingers and transferred to the mucous membranes if the person touches their nose, eyes or mouth.

The virus uses its spike to bind to, and then invade, an epithelial cell in the respiratory tract.

Once inside, it releases a package of genetic instructions, called RNA, that use the cell's machinery to make parts for new virus particles.

The parts are knitted together to form hundreds of new virus particles that then burst out of the now wrecked cell and go on to infect other cells.

Cells that are attacked in the throat, lungs and muscles give rise to the classic symptoms of a sore throat, respiratory wheeze and muscle ache.

The high fever that is also a hallmark of flu is a response of the immune system against the invader. This defensive reaction continues until the viruses are eliminated.

Most people recover without complications after a week or two, but the disease can be dangerous for people with a chronic condition such as asthma or heart disease, or for the elderly, very young and others with a weaker immune system.

It can also lead to bacterial infection, such as bronchitis or life-threatening pneumonia.

Flu viruses fall into three main families.

Type A, the commonest, not only circulates among humans but also among birds and pigs, providing a unique opportunity to acquire new genetic variants that can leap the species barrier and spark a pandemic.

Type B can also cause epidemics, but usually produces a milder disease than Type A. Type C viruses, like Type B, are humans-only pathogens but have never been associated with a large epidemic.

Virus families are further sub-divided according to their two surface proteins, haemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).

Mexico's swine flu virus has sparked alarm because it it presents a new genetic mix for which there may be no immunity and for which it will take months to devise and produce a vaccine.

It is a substrain of H1N1, presenting a new pattern of genes that resulted from a mix of existing viruses of human, pig and avian flu. Still unclear, though, is how contagious and virulent it is.

as of 04/30/2009 1:12 AM