The chills, the sweats…fevers not only feel terrible;they also make the body work hard! For every twodegrees Fahrenheit your temperature goes up, yourheart rate increases ten percent. Why does the bodygo through such laborious misery when we're sick?

畏寒，出汗...发烧不仅让人感觉难受，还让身体负担更重!体温每增高2华氏摄氏度，心率就提高百分之十。为什么生病时，身体会经历这样痛苦的折磨呢?

The good news is that there is a method to fever's madness. Fever helps the body fightinfection by revving up the immune system. Turn up the heat in the body, and many bodyprocesses speed up, including the production of white blood cells and how fast they findinfectious bacteria and viruses. Once there, white blood cells called macrophages gobble upinfectious organisms.

但令人欣慰的是，发烧是一种对付感染的好方法。发烧通过加速免疫系统来帮助身体抵抗感染。体温上升，许多机体运作加速，包括促进白细胞的产生以及快速发现感染性细菌或病毒。一但发烧，一种称作“巨噬细胞”的白细胞便会吞噬病原体。

Although higher body temperatures might kill some bacteria or viruses, fevers help us most byboosting the body's own immune response.

尽管高温会杀死一些细菌和病毒，但发烧对身体最大的益处在于提高人体自身的免疫反应。

Fevers are such valuable responses to infection that creatures all along the evolutionaryscale get them. That includes friendly neighborhood dogs and cats, as well as critters youmight not expect, such as insects and lizards.

发烧是对感染的一种反应，它是如此的宝贵，进化史上所有生物均具有这一特点。这些生物包括与人类友好的邻居——猫和狗，以及其它你想不到的动物，例如昆虫和蜥蜴。

In a lab, after a lizard is injected with live bacteria, it will creep under a heat lamp in order toraise its body temperature. That's not so different from piling on the blankets when you've gotthe feverish chills!

在实验室中蜥蜴被注射活细菌之后，为了提高身体的温度它会在热灯下爬行。这与你发烧打寒颤时拉毛毯来盖无本质差异。

Because fever revs up our immune response, reducing fever with medication could make theinfection last an extra day. But when you're feeling miserable, the tradeoff's probably worthit!

因为发烧加速我们的免疫反应，所以用药物退烧会让感染多持续一天。不过当你感觉痛苦，也许用药退烧也是值得的。