My Child is having Fever with Cough: What to Do?

All normal healthy human beings have defense mechanism against any insult to body. If any particle enters your windpipe or lungs, the body tries to push it out by coughing. When your windpipe and small breathing pipes get some irritation in them, may be by infection or allergy, it induces cough. Thus, cough is a defense mechanism of the human body. Cough has various underlying causes such as viral infection, allergy, asthma, something stuck in the windpipe (foreign body), etc. Viral infection is the most common cause of cough in children. It is very important to recognize the cause so as to give specific effective treatment.

Fever is again a body’s defense mechanism. Whenever any infecting agent (bacteria, virus, etc.) enters body, body induces defense mechanism to contain it (inflammation). In this process, a lot of chemicals are released by body which warm the body. This warming is to destroy the infecting agent. Thus, fever is a defense mechanism of the body against infection. Fever may occur in diseases without infection also. Such diseases can be long-standing chronic disorders or some serious acute diseases such as blood cancer (leukemia) and exact cause of fever need to be recognized timely to have good outcome. Generally, in children, fever indicates infection.