Also, I get that the fever can get really high at some point, which causes other effects, but why is our body not able to control its response to the infection so as to not do more harm with the fever?
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For why fevers can cause more harm than good in some cases, fevers are built for communities, not individuals. If you die from your fever, the disease does too, and the herd (which shares the fever gene) survives.
A fever that turns off when you get too hot would be much more complex to develop, potentially could more easily fail to stop the disease before it spreads, and likely wouldn’t do much for a community at large than just turning the fever on and playing chicken with the disease does, so the simple [fever on when sick] approach is where evolution landed.
We suppress it because modern medicine can target the right thing more often than a fever can. Sometimes a fever won’t help, other times we can fight the sickness better a different way, and either way preventing spread so aggressively is less important with modern hygiene.
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