Bacterial or viral infection triggers a coordinated set of physiological and behavioural responses — including fever, loss of appetite and warmth-seeking — that help the body to eliminate the pathogen and cope with its consequences. Precisely how these responses are organized by the brain, however, is unclear. In their new paper, Osterhout et al. identify a hypothalamic neuronal population that generates fever and orchestrates sickness behaviours during infection in mice.

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