14-year-old contracts malaria in home country and dies in Iowa hospital, coach says

A 14-year-old Iowa middle schooler who earned the nickname “Cheetah” for his speed on the football field has died of the mosquito-borne disease malaria.

Shawn Nupolu recently visited his home country of Liberia in West Africa for the first time in eight years, and he began feeling sick two weeks after returning home to Iowa, according to the Metro Youth Football Association.

He was diagnosed with malaria and was taken to Iowa City Children’s Hospital, where he died Saturday, April 22, the football association said.

Shawn was an eighth-grade student at Roosevelt Creative Corridor Business Academy. The football association said he “excelled in athletics and in the classroom.”

“Shawn is every coaches dream,” his coach, Flynn Lotito-Heald, said in a Facebook post. “Respectful, kind, humble, hard working and appreciative of every opportunity to pursue his passion for the game.”

One of his former teachers, Jaeden Peterson, described Shawn as “a wonderful young man.”

“He dreamt big and was committed to making those dreams come true,” Peterson said on Facebook. “The very first thing he told me when I met him was that he was going to be my favorite student, and he lived up to that promise in every way possible.”

Others described him as “kind, caring (and) a leader” and “pure gold..”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said “the vast majority” of malaria cases in the United States are from travelers who visited sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

There are about 2,000 malaria cases in the U.S. each year, the CDC said. In 2020, there were 241 million cases of the disease worldwide, including 627,000 deaths.

People get malaria after being bitten by an infected mosquito. Symptoms often don’t appear for more than 10 days after infection, and several forms of the infection can “cause kidney failure, seizures, mental confusion, coma and death,” according to the CDC.