Peace Corps agrees to pay $750,000 to family of volunteer who died after doctors misdiagnosed her malaria, law firm says

The Peace Corps has agreed to pay $750,000 to the family of a 24-year-old volunteer from Illinois who died in 2018 in East Africa after the agency's doctors misdiagnosed a case of malaria, a law firm announced Tuesday.

Bernice Heiderman of Inverness, Illinois, died in January 2018 on the island nation of Comoros after texting her mother that the local Peace Corps doctor wasn't taking seriously her complaints of dizziness, nausea, fever and fatigue, said Adam Dinnell, a partner at the Houston-based law firm of Schiffer Hicks Johnson PLLC.

The doctor told her to drink water and take aspirin, said Dinnell, whose firm filed a federal lawsuit for damages in Chicago on behalf of the Heiderman family.