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What's your temperature?

That's the question of the hour. The Ebola virus has made taking your temperature part of everyday conversation. People in West Africa are doing it. People returning from the region are doing it. And so are the overly paranoid in the United States.

For anyone who's been exposed to the virus, a body temperatures of 100.4 or higher has been deemed the point of concern. The goal, of course, is that magic number: 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Except 98.6 degrees isn't so magical after all. In fact, that might not be your normal temperature.

For insights into the range of temperatures we can experience, we consulted with Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior associate at the Center for Health Security at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and Dr. Benjamin Levine, a professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who knows a thing or two about fever (his specialty is exercise science).

For Ebola, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature for which medical attention is necessary.

When Ebola is not a factor, Levine defines 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit as a serious fever. (Although he notes that you could register a lower temperature and still be harboring an infection.)

These high temperatures can actually save your life. If you have an infection or virus, your body's response is to raise your internal temperature to kill it off. In other words, fever is your body's defense against whatever is making you feel sick. So before you take fever reducers like Tylenol or aspirin, you may want to consider letting your body do its job, says Levine.

"Lowering the temperature with Tylenol doesn't help you fight infection," he says. "It just masks it. But if the patient is shivering, shaking, sweating, you may want to lower [the temperature] for comfort reasons."

Baseline normal temperatures differ from person to person and from day to day. But if you're worried about what your thermometer is telling you, here are some points of interest, from the low to the very, very high.

56.7 degrees: Anna Bagenholm, a Swedish medical student, spent 80 minutes under ice after a skiing accident in Norway in 1999. When she was rescued, her body temperature was 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Although she was clinically dead, resuscitation efforts were successful and she now has only minor nerve damage. (Do not try this at home).

95 degrees: Initial signs of hypothermia set in, such as shivering, dizziness, confusion and increased heart rate, says Adalja.

98.6 degrees: This is the generally accepted "normal" temperature, though different people can have different "normals" and even the same person's temperature can vary throughout the day and still be considered normal. Temperature is lower in the morning, since you're less active, and women tend to have slightly (less than half a degree) higher baseline temperatures than men. A 1992 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association measured the temperature of 148 adults four times a day for three consecutive days. The mean was 98.2 degrees.

97-99 degrees: This is what most doctors would describe as the normal temperature range, according to Levine.

100.4 degrees: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified 100.4 as the benchmark for concern about Ebola. Depending on an individual's normal baseline and Ebola-related symptoms, a triple-digit temperature in the context of Ebola is cause for concern.

101.5 degrees: Anything at or above this level is classified as a serious fever, says Levine: "Lower doesn't mean you don't have an infection, but that's when you've crossed a threshold of concern."

107 degrees: Multiple organ failure can occur, and the high temperature itself might bring on seizures. But Adalja says hospitals in the U.S. wouldn't let it get to this point: you'd be treated with fever reducers and cooling blankets.

115 degrees: On July 10, 1980, 52-year-old Willie Jones of Atlanta was admitted to the hospital with heatstroke and a temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit. He spent 24 days in the hospital and survived. Jones holds the Guinness Book of World Records honor for highest recorded body temperature.

fever

temperature

medicine

Global Health

An outbreak of the plague has sickened at least 119 people and killed 40 in Madagascar, the World Health Organization reports Friday.

The outbreak started back in August in a rural village, WHO said. Then it spread to seven of Madagascar's 22 regions. Two cases have occurred in the country's capital of Antananarivo.

"There is now a risk of a rapid spread of the disease due to the city's high population density and the weakness of the health care system," the WHO writes.

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The plague is not new to Madagascar. The disease re-emerged in the country in the 1990s. And now Madagascar reports more cases than any other country — about 300 to 600 each year.

People catch the plague bacteria — Yersinia pestis — from fleas that live on rodents. So the disease thrives in cities with poor sanitation.

After a coup d'etat in 2009, Antananarivo's health and sanitation systems collapsed, Aaron Ross wrote on the Pulitzer Center's website in January. "Trash can go weeks, even months, without being collected and rats have become a common sight along the narrow alleyways that coil around the city's steep hillsides," Ross wrote.

The plague's signature symptom is large, swollen lymph nodes. This form of the disease is called bubonic plague. And it's not very contagious.

When the infection moves to the lungs, it's called pneumonic plague, a form that's more dangerous. It kills quickly, and it spreads from person to person through coughs.

In the current outbreak, so far, only 2 percent of the cases are pneumonic, WHO says.

Both forms of the plague are easily cured with antibiotics when the disease is caught early.

Madagascar

bubonic plague

Infectious Disease

Global Health

The United States has seen many fundraisers headlined by an Obama in recent years, but this week it won't be the president or the first lady — it will be his step-grandmother, Sarah Obama, who is raising funds to build a school and hospital in her hometown, Kogelo, Kenya.

Obama, who runs the Mama Sarah Obama Foundation and was honored with an Education Pioneer award at the United Nations on Wednesday as part of its Women's Entrepreneurship Day, has spent much of her life helping young people — and particularly young women — in her region get an education.

President Obama's last surviving grandparent, whom he referred to as Granny in his memoir Dreams from My Father, never went to school herself, she tells NPR's Scott Simon through an interpreter.

"It was very hard for women to get an education," when she was growing up, the 94-year-old Obama says. "Only young boys or men were allowed to go to school."

But things are different in Kenya now, she says. United Nations data actually shows a higher percentage of Kenyan girls going to school than Kenyan boys.

"I encourage them — even the ones who have had families at a young age — I encourage them to go to school so that the cycle of poverty can end," Obama says. She sometimes uses her grandson as an example of the doors an education can open.

Often, Obama says, she and her foundation provide much more than encouragement.

"I help the orphans and widows, especially the young girls who have been orphaned by their parents dying of HIV," she says. "I am their sole parent right now, so I help them pay school fees and also get them the things that they need, like sanitary towels, books, necessities like a pencil, school uniforms. That's what I do."

It's an investment that Sarah Obama says she gets an unbeatable return on.

"There's so many kids that I've helped educate, some of them at Nairobi University, Moi University and also Bondo University," she says. "These are orphans who I've helped pay for their school fares, and now it's my joy to see them in the universities about to graduate. There's a lot of success stories, and it just makes me happy and it keeps me going."

Kenya

President Obama

An outbreak of the plague has sickened at least 119 people and killed 40 in Madagascar, the World Health Organization reports Friday.

The outbreak started back in August in a rural village, WHO said. Then it spread to seven of Madagascar's 22 regions. Two cases have occurred in the country's capital of Antananarivo.

"There is now a risk of a rapid spread of the disease due to the city's high population density and the weakness of the health care system," the WHO writes.

Goats and Soda

Shades Of The Middle Ages: The Plague Popped Up In China And Colorado

Shots - Health News

Decoded DNA Reveals Details Of Black Death Germ

The plague is not new to Madagascar. The disease re-emerged in the country in the 1990s. And now Madagascar reports more cases than any other country — about 300 to 600 each year.

People catch the plague bacteria — Yersinia pestis — from fleas that live on rodents. So the disease thrives in cities with poor sanitation.

After a coup d'etat in 2009, Antananarivo's health and sanitation systems collapsed, Aaron Ross wrote on the Pulitzer Center's website in January. "Trash can go weeks, even months, without being collected and rats have become a common sight along the narrow alleyways that coil around the city's steep hillsides," Ross wrote.

The plague's signature symptom is large, swollen lymph nodes. This form of the disease is called bubonic plague. And it's not very contagious.

When the infection moves to the lungs, it's called pneumonic plague, a form that's more dangerous. It kills quickly, and it spreads from person to person through coughs.

In the current outbreak, so far, only 2 percent of the cases are pneumonic, WHO says.

Both forms of the plague are easily cured with antibiotics when the disease is caught early.

Madagascar

bubonic plague

Infectious Disease

Global Health