For each decade later that a person was born, their average body temperature as an adult declined by about 0.03C Andrew Matthews/PAFor a century textbooks have said confidently that the human body functions best at a temperature of 37C. They may now have to be rewritten. A study has shown that average body temperatures have fallen in the West since the 1800s, very possibly because we suffer fewer fevers than our Victorian forebears. “We found that today’s human body temperatures are approximately 0.6C lower than those in the 19th century,” Julie Parsonnet, of Stanford University in California, said. “I think that the loss of many infectious diseases — tuberculosis, periodontal disease, malaria, dysentery, vaccine preventable diseases, rheumatic heart disease — through public health and antibiotics has decreased the chronic inflammation people used to live with.”While it is possible to calculate an average for a population,…

Source: The Times January 13, 2020 00:00 UTC