Climate change could take malaria and other diseases to Britain and trigger more frequent heatwaves that will have huge health impacts, British doctors said. 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 organization's head of science and ethics, Vivienne Nathanson, said.