The Worst Outbreaks in U.S. History

Why 'normal' Body Temperature, Isn't The Norm

Clinicians have long adhered to 98.6 degrees as the standard, healthy human temperature, but recent research suggests it's more commonly between 97.3 and 98.2 degrees Fahrenheit. As such, health professionals should move away from the traditional temperature benchmark to provide optimal care for patients, The Washington Post reported Dec. 25.

The debate over this specific benchmark has been ongoing since it was introduced as metric in the 19th century. Several studies throughout the years have found the same, that 98.6 often is not the average temperature for many healthy individuals. 

Since medical diagnoses and metrics like temperature can vary from person to person, some have suggested the metric be personalized and measured as an average on an individual basis, like blood pressure. 

"There is no reason why doctors can't do this routinely," Adele Diamond, PhD, a professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of British Columbia in Canada who has researched the topic, told The Post. "There is a need to individualize it."

The need to individualize could lead to improved patient outcomes. Since temperature is an important tool for clinicians to look at related to medical conditions and diagnoses, a more personalized understanding of what is average for one patient could help identify certain conditions more quickly. 

"When patients come in and say: "I don't feel well, and this temperature is not normal for me,' you should listen to them," Julie Parsonnet, MD, professor of medicine, epidemiology and population health at Stanford (Calif.) University, told the outlet.

98.6 Degrees No Longer The Benchmark For Normal Temperature

Dr. Carl Wunderlich, a 19th-century German physician gave us the magic figure of 98.6 degrees. This was done by him after collecting and analysing over a million armpit temperatures for 25,000 patients.

This has been corrected by Harvard researchers and appears in the April issue of the Harvard Health Letter.

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The average normal temperature for adults is found to be 98.2 degrees, not 98.6 degrees, and replaced the 100.4 degrees fever mark with fever thresholds based on the time of day.

Research findings of another group form Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y., have found that older people have lower temperatures, even when older people are ill, their body temperature may not reach levels that people recognize as fever.

The bottom line is that individual variations in body temperature should be taken into account, reports the Harvard Health Letter.

Therefore to measure temperature effectively the doctor should have enough temperature measurements at various times of day to establish a baseline for you.

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So, the 98.6 degrees F temperature threshold no longer is valid for assessment of fever.

Viewpoint: How Do We Cope With New Normal Of Weather Extremes?

Arnold Toynbee, the mid-20th century recorder of the rise and fall of civilizations, criticized the notion that "History is just one damn thing after another." Day to day, however, that seems to be the way we think of the passage of current events — one damn thing after another. Crises of the day come and go, routinely lost in a receding memory hole.

One current event is different from all the others we humans have experienced, now or ever. It involves CO2, carbon dioxide. As most of us know, CO2 is the Earth's primary greenhouse gas. Until the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century, the density of CO2 stood at 280 parts per million (ppm). Since then, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increased, slowly at first, but then, as coal and oil powered the world's economy to become the complex giant it is today, CO2 has reached new heights.

From March 1958 to the present, scientists (now the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration) have measured atmospheric levels of CO2 at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, month by month. That first 1958 measurement recorded CO2 at 313 ppm. The latest reading at Mauna Loa is 420 ppm. NOAA maintains on its web site a graph showing the rate of increase of CO2 levels from 1958 to now. The graph shows a slightly bending arc at close to a 45-degree angle. The arc bends because the rate of increasing levels of CO2 is itself increasing, not declining. According to NOAA, that rise in CO2 has already led to an increase in the world's temperature by 1 degree Celsius (roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit). So what does any of this mean to us living day to day, watching the latest crisis on TV?

Evidence found in cores of ancient ice and from fossil plants and sea plankton show that the last time the Earth experienced CO2 in the atmosphere at 420 ppm probably occurred in the middle of the Pliocene epoch. At that point, our ancestor species, small brained and large mouthed (raw plants our primary food) but at least bipedal, had not yet learned how to control fire. At that point, long before 800,000 years of ice ages came and went, both North and South poles had little if any ice. Sea levels, therefore, were 30 or more feet higher than today.

Unfortunately, while world politicians claim to be doing something to reverse the rise of greenhouse gases, they are not doing well, as Mauna Loa's steepening curve exemplifies. Practically speaking, no one in the world is actually reducing our extraction and burning of fossil fuel. Just a few days ago, the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that the world's temperature had risen to 2.06°C above pre-industrial levels. To put this in context, the goal of the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change, was, according to the UN, to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels" and pursue efforts "to limit the temperature increases to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels." So much for the UN's "goal" of 1.5°C.

We experience now wild extremes of heat waves, droughts and killing forest fires, not to mention equally deadly bouts of arctic cold. Though life will go on no matter how crazy the weather, we should assume extremes are the new normal. So what can we do to cope?

Of greatest importance, we cannot afford the polarization that afflicts us. We must treat each other as members of the same in-group, humanity, because the outer world we have created since the Industrial Revolution has become our enemy. Humanity rose to civilization by first joining together around a cooking fire some 1 million or 2 million years ago. We lived and worked together then; we must do so now. Hatred for the other, even mere disdain, is a luxury none of us can afford as climate's bite gets harder and deeper.

John Hamilton lives in South Bend.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: How do we cope as weather extremes become new normal?

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