Fewer than one in five British travellers to malarial regions takes prophylactic drugs a London symposium heard last week. Peter Chiodini the director of the malaria reference laboratory, a division of the Health Protection Agency, which monitors imported cases of malaria, was speaking.

Speaking at the Royal Society of Medicine’s clinical update conference on tropical and travel medicine, he said that the single most important piece of advice a doctor could give to someone planning to travel to tropical destinations was to take appropriate precautions against malaria.

The latest figures from the agency show that more than 1500 UK travellers contracted malaria in 2007, and five of them died. Fewer than …