Part of beneficial host response?

I was most interested in this and other recent articles on the
beneficial effects of temperature on the host response to micro-organisms.

It used to be said when I was young that you should "sweat it out" when
suffering from a fever. Yet when working on the wards, I frequently found
miserably cold febrile elderly (and sometimes younger) patients, shivering
in their beds, and had to persuade the nurses to provide extra blankets
for them. Nurses are of course very busy and running round, so it is hard
for them to udnerstand what an ill, febrile, weak, immobile person is
feeling, but to me it has always been instinctive to keep warm when I have
a fever, as at a higher temperature you lose more heat to your
surroundings, quite apart from any effect on the organisms. Nurses seem to
always resist this, perhaps due to fear of febrile convulsions, which in
fact only happen in children. As a result many patients suffer
unnecessarily, and may not recover so quickly either, if the apparently
beneficial effects of higher temperature on the causative organisms are
lost. Perhaps the "old wives" knew a thing or two!

Competing interests:
None declared