Fever Contagious
Is a fever contagious? In a word, no. A fever is your body's means of fighting infection, or an infectious disease. A fever can be scary, but it's sometimes necessary. To understand why a fever is not contagious, you need to understand that it is both a condition and a definition. The condition is one of your bodily temperature being more than it normally should be. The definition is, any body temperature that is one degree of more above normal, is defined as a fever. If your temperature is 98.6, which is normal, you don't have a fever. If your temperature is 99.6 or more, you have a fever. Your fever is the result of your immune system kicking into action to fight a bacterial or viral infection in your body. The infection that is causing the fever is what may be contagious.
When we say that something is contagious, we're talking about something that can be transmitted or passed directly from one person to another. A fever is simply a condition, and cannot in itself be transmitted. But there seems to be some contradictions to this. If you were to ask, is Dengue fever contagious? The answer is yes. But in this case we're talking about the name of the disease. The fever, resulting from the disease isn't contagious, but the disease itself, which is an infection, is very contagious. Yellow fever is another disease which at one time was thought to be contagious, but people who should know, believe otherwise. Yellow fever is of course spread by the mosquito, rather than from person to person.
What about Scarlet fever, is Scarlet fever contagious? It certainly is a dreaded disease, and the answer is yes, but again we're talking about the name of the disease. Scarlet fever is spread by bacteria in the throat. The fever the patient has, which is a result of having the infectious bacteria, and consequently the disease, is not in itself contagious. You just can't catch "an elevated temperature" from anyone.
We'll look at one more "fever". Is Rheumatic fever contagious? The answer to this one is no, however, rheumatic fever is triggered by a strep infection, which is contagious. The fact that there are diseases such as this, which have the word “fever” as part of their name, is undoubtedly a source of confusion to many. Even when someone has the flu, which can be quite contagious, they are "carrying a fever". If we get too close to them we might find ourselves carrying a fever a few days later. It would be easy enough to say that we caught their fever, but what we caught instead, was a helping of their infectious bacteria. They kept their fever all to themselves, as you will as well.
So when anyone is running a fever, it doesn't mean you have to avoid them, but you really should know what is causing that fever before you decide to get too close.