The signs and symptoms of swine flu are similar to that of a typical flu. A person infected with swine flu generally experiences runny nose, body pains, unusual tiredness, sore throat, headache, loss of appetite, shortness of breath or cough, and most commonly, fever or a body temperature over 38°C/100.4°F. But an odd feature of the new virus that increases its risk and difficulty in controlling is the lack of fever among the common symptoms of swine flu.
Fever is a major determinant of influenza especially if a physician would be symptomatic in treating their patients or in detecting swine flu. Most infectious-disease experts consider fever as the most important sign of an infection or disease but getting infected with a disease such as swine flu and not having the most significant symptom makes the infection doubly dangerous.
The absence of fever can lead to an even wider spread of swine flu especially among students and in saturated areas such as supermarkets. The dangers of not having fever when one is already infected with swine flu is that a person can unconsciously pass on the virus or gets to be mis-diagnosed should the person get fever but is relatively low compared to fever experienced by those who are laboratory-tested swine flu cases.
Swine Flu Pandemic
The pandemic H1N1 PB2 gene, an avian type of gene, is said to be the root of the high frequency of infections that has been reported to have come without any fever.
In humans and other mammals however, high temperatures or fevers that are extremely high are normally detrimental for an infectious agent. But in the case of the avian gene PB2, an increased level of infection for the virus comes with a high temperature. This explains why some hosts may pose a feedback mechanism that keeps their temperature low thus limiting viral duplication.
Symptoms Of Swine Flu And No Fever
The absence of a fever may contribute to increased exposures and human susceptibility to swine flu because the patient may assume that he or she is not infected with swine flu. The lack of fever likely has a serious effect when passing through borders; an infected patient can pass through border checks that use fever as a diagnostic tool. Almost half of infected patients who pass through borders can get through without getting detected thereby it makes the spread of swine flu easier and faster among countries.
The absence of fever can also seriously impact students. Students who are infected but have no fever will most likely continue to attend school because they will safely assume that an absence of fever guarantees freedom from swine flu. Since serious cases have no fever, the absence of a fever should not be associated with the idea that no virus transmission can happen and that these students will not be able to cause an onset of an H1N1 pandemic.