The South of England has suffered recurrent bouts of malaria in recorded history. For centuries 'ague' was endemic in the fens and marshes of the Thames estuary. While most areas exhibited rates of around 20-30 deaths per 1,000 per annum, marshland communities straddling the Thames had rates often exceeding 70 per 1,000.

Epidemics of 'ague' were associated with warmer ambient temperatures. A positive correlation was noted between warm, dry summers between 1660 and 1810 and seasonal burial rates in Bradwell-juxta-Mare, a marsh parish in Essex. There was an unusually hot summer in 1661 in which, according to Pepys
"the heat lasted on unbroken into the winter, which as to warmth and every other thing (is) just as it were the middle of May or June" and during this time the whole year "hath been very sickly".
The historian Sydenham describes epidemic in August of the same year as
"intermittent fevers doing harmful mischief" .

Following the research by Ross into the disease which was published in 1911, it is believed that Shoebury was the last place in the British Isles to be cleared of malaria. Apart from a few cases when malaria which was reimported, for example a local epidemic of vivax malaria after the return of soldiers during World War I on the Isle of Sheppey, the disease has now disappeared from the UK.

"Return of indigenous malaria in the UK has not yet occurred. The greater availability of cheap tropical and subtropical travel will result in more primary infections of humans with blood that could infect home grown mosquitoes. With increased global warming, occasional cases of secondary malaria will occur in UK residents who have not been abroad but the average tertiary spread will be to less than one other human and thus malaria will not establish itself (for malaria to persist, on average a patient with malaria would have to transmit infection to at least one other human, otherwise the infection would die out). Within the next few decades tertiary spread of infection may occur in the UK, with spread to at least one other person. Indigenous malaria will then be with us."
Malaria in the UK: past, present, and future
T Chin and P D Welsby
Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, UK

Many people in the area note the size and virulence of the local mosquitoes which are generally of the anopheles group of the species - the beasts that used to carry malaria in the past. It is possible that they could carry the disease again in the future. However, the standard of housing, sanitation, hygiene and general health has changed a great deal since the beginning of the last century and as those were considered to be as much of a problem as the disease itself the likelihood of such epidemics is slight.