To clarify the question:
1. Why does our body raise the temperature so high to the point where neither we nor whatever is inside us can survive?
2. How does our body raise the temperature?
-Follow up question:
What is the highest temperature our body can achieve on it’s own?
In: Biology
It’s extremely rare for a fever to drive the human body temperature to its lethal limit outright, in fact most fevers barely break 102F.
Certainly the brain is capable of doing it, but it wouldn’t make evolutionary sense to have a lethal kill switch that turns on whenever we get sick. 107F and beyond is when brain damage is considered to begin, but an endogenously initiated fever won’t even come close to this in almost all cases.
As far as initiating a fever, it’s easy- your brain turns up the thermostat. As a result, your body thinks it’s cold since your core temperature of say, 98F is way below the new setpoint of 100F. So your body begins shivering, which generates a lot of waste heat from your large muscles contracting. This drives the temperature up.
Our body can survive higher temperatures than whatever infection we have. Plus better safe than sorry, so it knows even if there’s a 20% of dying from a temperature, there’s a higher chance of dying from the infection.
Getting a fever is an action of last resort in an attempt to basically cook the invading organism while it may damage the body, if the infection is killed the body can repair any damage later, before modern medicine there was no other option available in desperate times. https://youtu.be/zp9Aa3Bp8SM
It’s normally not self-destructive, and in fact, it evolved as being self-protective. Fevers are intended to kill whatever pathogen is causing an infection, and it does this by raising the temperature to a temperature it hopes the microbe can’t survive at.
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