US Sailor dies with cerebral malaria

The Seabee was unconscious, with a tube stuck down his throat to help him breathe. His kidneys, liver and lungs were failing, and he was in shock, with his blood pressure falling.
Carrell, 23, was suffering from severe falciparum malaria, an infection of red blood cells acquired from mosquito bites that had sent parasites coursing through his bloodstream, sticking to capillaries, obstructing blood flow, damaging organs and, worst of all, causing his brain to swell.
It was three days before last Christmas. Carrell had been infected during a deployment to Liberia. He and 24 other Seabees from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 3 were in the fourth month of a goodwill mission to renovate a hospital.
Joshua Dae Ho Carrell
At Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, with the best care military medicine could provide, Carrell’s vital signs improved at first. But the day after Christmas, the petty officer third class from Port Angeles, Wash., was declared brain dead. His devastated mother couldn’t watch when they took him off the respirator. A friend stayed and recorded the time of his final heartbeat: exactly 10:28 a.m.
Cause of death: cerebral malaria.
Although scores of U.S. troops are infected every year by malaria — 60 were diagnosed last year, and about 150 were diagnosed in 2003 — Carrell is just the second to die of the disease in more than a decade, according to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. About 40 percent of the cases involved the falciparum strain.
Numerous measures that might have prevented Carrell’s death — including the sailor’s own failure to follow the prescribed antibiotic anti-malarial regimen — went seriously awry, a Navy command investigation showed.
The investigation, conducted by U.S. Naval Forces Africa, revealed "multiple shortfalls with the [Seabee battalion’s] planning, training, execution and enforcement of preventive measures for malaria," according to a copy of the investigation report provided to Stars and Stripes by U.S. Naval Forces Africa.
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=69448