Climate change could bring malaria and other diseases to Britain and trigger more frequent heatwaves that will have huge health impacts, doctors said on Thursday.

With the exception of Lyme disease, insect-borne diseases are largely unknown in Britain. But global warming could change that in a few decades, according to a report from the British Medical Association (BMA).

"Higher temperatures and heavier rainfall may increase the spread of infections like malaria that have previously been virtually non-existent in the UK," the organisation's Head of Science and Ethics, Dr Vivienne Nathanson, said.

But Paul Reiter, chief entomologist at the US Government's dengue research laboratory in Puerto Rico, says climate change is not to blame.

He pointed out, in an interview with New Scientist magazine, that virtually all of the US was plagued by malaria in the 1880s, and that the disease had been endemic as far north as Finland.

Improvements in public health monitoring as well as increases in population density helped largely eliminate the threat of the disease toward the last decade of the 19th century.