Question: can we get malaria in england?

Julian Rayner answered on 21 Mar 2011:

Hi lozza2k11.

Not any more, but there certainly used to be malaria in England, especially out in East Anglia and in the marshes in Kent. You can find references to in Shakespeare – if you see a reference to a disease called “ague” (which means fever and shaking), chances are it is probably malaria.

Malaria died out in England a few hundred years ago, probably due to a bunch of reasons, marshes being drained, cooler weather killing of mosquitoes, that sort of thing. It was never terribly well established here, but was endemic in other places in Europe for much longer – malaria had been found around Rome since the Roman Empire and was only wiped out in the 1940s. Same in the USA too – lots of malaria in the Southeast (Florida, Georgia, Alabama), until the government did a lot of spraying and draining in the 1930s and 40s.

Why can’t we just do the same in Africa or Asia? Because the problem is much much worse there, although some of the same techniques are certainly used.