On May 24 last year a pregnant woman and an older housewife staggered into Kenema hospital in eastern Sierra Leone and were diagnosed within a day as the country's first Ebola cases.

The younger patient lost her baby but both were lucky to survive a virulent tropical virus which over the following 12 months laid waste to the country, leaving nearly 4,000 people dead.

America's largest tobacco companies must inform consumers that cigarettes were designed to increase addiction, but not that they lied to the public about the dangers of smoking, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.

The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is a partial win for cigarette makers in the long-running legal fight that began in the Clinton administration in 1999. In this latest round, the companies objected to running court-ordered advertisements that would have branded themselves as liars.

Bacteria -- and not a contaminated vaccine as initially suspected -- were to blame for the recent deaths of two Mexican babies and for sickening 29 others, according to an official investigation.

The babies, from the indigenous town of Simojovel in southern Chiapas state, became sick after receiving Hepatitis B shots earlier this month. 

Some 3,000 cases of cholera have been reported in Tanzania, mainly among Burundian refugees fleeing political violence, the U.N. said Friday, adding that up to 400 new cases were being counted daily.

So far, 31 people have died of the water-borne disease in the area around the western Tanzanian border town Kaguna, which has been flooded with refugees, the U.N. refugee agency said.

Ignoring noisy buses and curious onlookers, street dentist Allah Baksh plunges his hands into a patient's mouth to fit a sparkling set of dentures for $12 in the Indian city of Bangalore.

With his plastic stool, mirror and glass cases of teeth on display, Baksh is among hundreds of such dentists frowned upon by their licenced counterparts in rapidly modernising India. 

A Malawi court has ruled that 11 prostitutes who were forced to take HIV tests by police six years ago will be awarded damages, a court official said Thursday citing a judgement.

The sex workers were rounded up in 2009 in the southern city of Mwanza, hauled to a government hospital for HIV testing without their consent and the results were disclosed in an open court.

A new kind of brain implant senses a patient's intent to move a robotic arm, offering new promise to people who are paralyzed or have lost limbs, researchers said Thursday.

Erik Sorto, 34, is "the first person in the world to have a neural prosthetic device implanted in a region of the brain where intentions are made," said the study in the journal Science.

South Korea said Thursday it has confirmed three cases of a respiratory virus that has killed hundreds of people in the Middle East.

A 76-year-old man was diagnosed Thursday with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A Slovenian doctor was in custody on Thursday on suspicion of having killed at least seven terminally ill patients, authorities said.

"After a very thorough investigation, we believe there are reasonable suspicions of several crimes committed by the accused," state prosecutor Katarina Bergant said.

Colder weather kills more people than hot spells, a probe into a key issue of public-health policy said on Thursday.

Researchers looked into 74 million deaths between 1985 and 2012 in 13 countries where there was a wide variety of climate, from chilly to subtropical.