When babies develop a fever high enough or abrupt enough to cause a seizure, frightened parents often rush them to the emergency room, where their workup frequently includes a lumbar puncture (spinal tap) to rule out bacterial meningitis.

A new debate in the open access journal PLoS Medicine questions whether all African children with fever should be treated presumptively with antimalarial drugs, or if treatment should wait until laboratory tests confirm malarial infection.

A child spikes a high fever, sometimes as high as 104 or 105 degrees, and sometimes causing seizures. She's rushed to the emergency room, the hospital runs test after test, specialists are brought in, but no explanation is found.

A new study suggests that a vaccine targeting Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) may prevent infectious mononucleosis, commonly known as “mono” or “glandular fever.” The study is published in the December 15 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online.

The international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières has witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of patients with the parasitic disease visceral leishmaniasis (“kala azar”) admitted to its treatment center in Somalia. The disease is transmitted by sand flies and causes fever, weight loss, anemia, and enlargement of the liver and spleen.

Fever is an effective defence against disease, but new research suggests that not all animals use it when exposed to infection. The study, published online in the British Ecological Society’s journal Functional Ecology, found large differences in fever responses among closely related species of mice and suggests that an animal’s reproductive strategy could explain some of this intriguing variation.

Researchers provide new details about the inner workings of a parasitic worm that causes a tropical disease called schistosomiasis, which leads to itchy skin, fever, chills, muscle aches, and liver disease that, in some cases, can be fatal.

When your body cranks up the heat, it’s a sign that something’s wrong—and a fever is designed to help fight off the infection. But turning up the temperature can have a down side: in about one in 25 infants or small children, high fever can trigger fever-induced (febrile) seizures.

With the finding that fever is produced by the action of a hormone on a specific site in the brain, scientists have answered a key question as to how this adaptive function helps to protect the body during bacterial infection and other types of illness.

Researchers have shown that a drug that was extensively tested against cancer may also qualify as a new drug against African sleeping sickness.

Despite the fact that they both infect the liver, the hepatitis A and hepatitis C viruses actually have very little in common. The two are far apart genetically, are transmitted differently, and produce very different diseases. Hepatitis A spreads through the consumption of fecal particles from an infected person (in pollution-contaminated food or water, for example), but hepatitis C is generally transmitted only by direct contact with infected blood.