According to a Department of Health report issued this week, the South of England may experience outbreaks of malaria during the next 50 to 100 years because of warmer weather.

Although such outbreaks are likely to be rare they will not be new. This country was plagued by malaria for centuries, when the climate was cooler. In the 1300s Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about ague, the old word for malaria, in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and Shakespeare mentions it in several plays. Samuel Pepys, Charles II and Oliver Cromwell were some of the famous victims of the disease.

The type of malaria was different from the tropical malaria most often seen these days. The malarial parasite tolerated cooler temperatures, and the mosquitos carrying the disease tended to live in marshes, so the drainage of marshes and the decline of rural populations through the 1800s led to the numbers of malaria cases fall.

The last serious outbreak struck during the First World War on the Isle of Sheppey, when soldiers returning from the Balkans brought the disease with them. British mosquitoes picked up the disease and went on to infect local people. The last known case of indigenous malaria occurred in 1953.