German measles is officially gone from North and South America, the first region to rid itself of the disease, health officials announced Wednesday.

Vaccines against German measles were first licensed in 1969, and were included in mass vaccination campaigns. It is now part of childhood shots.

A Los Angeles jury awarded $13 million to a 73-year-old woman who contracted a deadly disease from using asbestos-containing talcum powder manufactured by Colgate-Palmolive Co.

Jurors deliberated for two hours Tuesday before finding that New York-based Colgate was 95 percent responsible for Judith Winkel's mesothelioma, a fatal lung disease, according to her lawyers. The verdict included $1.4 million in damages for her husband.

In a new medical breakthrough for 3D printing, U.S. doctors have saved the lives of three children with a fatal airway disease by creating personalized implants that their bodies can absorb.

Three babies who were on the brink of death from tracheobronchomalacia, an incurable disorder which causes the windpipe to collapse, were given airway splints that allowed them to recover and breathe freely, said the research published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The world is doing far too little to combat the misuse of antibiotics which is fueling drug resistance and allowing long-treatable diseases to become killers, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. 

In its first ever analysis of how countries are responding to the problem of antimicrobial resistance -- when bugs become immune to existing drugs -- the U.N. health agency revealed "major gaps" in all six regions of the world. 

The World Health Organization on Tuesday unveiled a plan to eradicate the deadly Ebola virus,  aiming to identify and isolate the dwindling number of new cases by the end of May.

In its new plan, the U.N. health agency stressed the importance of maintaining the massive efforts to rid the worst-affected nations -- Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone -- of the viral disease, cases of which have already fallen sharply.

Top Japanese drugmaker Takeda Pharmaceutical on Wednesday warned of its first annual loss in more than six decades after agreeing to pay around $2.4 billion to settle lawsuits over its Actos diabetes drug, amid cancer claims.

The company said costs regarding the U.S. lawsuits would send it into the red for the first time since it was listed on stock exchanges in 1949.

In the tobacco-producing heartland of China -- the world's largest cigarette market -- smoking is commonplace at work, in taxis and even in hospitals.

Snatching a break, construction worker Yao Xinggang takes deep puffs on a cigarette through a traditional-style water pipe.

U.S. fast-food chain Chipotle said Monday it had crossed off food made with genetically modified organisms (GMO) from its menus, saying they haven't been proven safe for consumption and the environment.

"There is a lot of debate about genetically modified foods," said Steve Ells, Chipotle's founder, chairman and co-chief executive, in a statement.

Professor Raghid Khouri, Head of the Department of Urology at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Notre Dame de Secours in Jbeil and president-elect of the Lebanese Association for urology, conducted the first of its kind surgery in Lebanon, the Middle East and Africa, to eradicate tumors that form in the bladder using a new technique known as the HybridKnife.

HybridKnife technique constitutes an important turning point in this type of surgery and helps to remove the tumors in a single bloc, which prevents the spread of cancer cells.

Women who are obese while pregnant may put their offspring at risk of childhood diabetes, a condition that requires lifelong insulin therapy, Swedish researchers said Tuesday.

A study of more than 1.2 million children born in Sweden between 1992 and 2004 and monitored for several years, found a 33-percent higher risk for the disease among children whose mothers were obese during the first trimester of pregnancy, but were not diabetic themselves.