Nulliparity and labour longer than 12 h were also independent predictors for maternal pyrexia. The illness is marked by great exhaustion, fever… A fever without any obvious cause is termed a pyrexia of unknown origin (PUO). The degree of this pyrexia increases with the duration of labour. In the past, it’s been suggested that epidural analgesia (the pain meds) is what causes laboring moms to burn up, but a new study in the August issue of Anesthesiology provides some surprising insight into the cause of maternal intrapartum fever (MIF). Clinical fever is also far more likely in women laboring with epidural analgesia. FRIDAY. By Jenifer Goodwin HealthDay Reporter. About a half hour before i delivered my son the nurse discovered I had a 103.5 fever. Did you know you might get a fever during labor? She said my son would have to go to the nicu since he would have a fever as well. However, with intensive, repetitive and costly diagnostic testing, a definitive cause for the fever is usually found. Clinical signs suggestive of sepsis include one or more of the following: pyrexia, hypothermia, tachycardia, tachypnoea, hypoxia, hypotension, oliguria, impaired consciousness and failure to respond to treatment. Crowded living conditions, army camps, and on shipboard are primary places for typhoid fever to take hold. It happens when there is a temporary rise in body temperature. I was admitted feeling just fine and was given several drugs to induce labor at 39 weeks because baby was measuring under 10th perentile. Pyrexia, or fever, is common in dogs and cats, being a normal biological response by the body to a bacterial or viral infection or other threat. While maternal pyrexia during labour may be an indicator of chorioamnionitis, it is difficult to determine clinically owing to the range of other causes of pyrexia such as epidural use [, , ], direct physiological effects of labour, dehydration , elevated ambient temperature , and use of misoprostol . Typhoid fever (Salmonella typhi) is a water borne illness and is most often found where there are unsanitary conditions. Feb. 3 (HealthDay News) -- The babies of women who develop an epidural-related fever while in labor are at greater risk of having problems right at birth, including poor muscle tone, breathing difficulties, low Apgar scores and seizures, a new study suggests.. These signs, including pyrexia, may not always be present and are not necessarily related to the severity of sepsis. A fever is a common side effect of illness like the flu. Epidural analgesia is associated with maternal pyrexia (temperature ≥38°C), with an odds ratio of 4.0 (95% CI 2.0–7.7). It is possible that the observed slow increase in mean temperature is an artifact of averaging the temperature curves of a small group of women who eventually develop fever with a larger group who remain afebrile throughout labor. You probably always heard that the average human body temperature is 98.6 F. But the reality is that a "normal" body temperature can fall within a wide range, from 97 F to 99 F. METHODS: A retrospective medical record review searching for women who had a fever greater than 100.4 degrees F while in the active phase of labor during a 1-year period at the University of Michigan was undertaken to investigate the relation between isolated maternal fever in labor and neonatal sepsis.