A cheap, oral vaccine provided "significant" protection against cholera in a real-life trial in Bangladesh, where the disease kills thousands every year, scientists reported on Thursday.

The research with nearly 270,000 adults and children in the slums of Mirpur in Dhaka, was the first to demonstrate the drug's effectiveness on-site in an endemic setting, said the authors of a study published in The Lancet.

The World Bank warned Wednesday that the loss of health care workers amid the Ebola epidemic in western Africa could increase women's deaths from complications of pregnancy and childbirth.

An additional 4,022 deaths of women could be seen each year across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the countries hardest hit by the recent Ebola outbreak, the Bank said in a report that looks at the impact beyond the epidemic's direct effects.

Greece's slide to the brink of financial collapse may be abstract to many outsiders, but for the country's chronically sick, it is a matter of life and death.

Yiannis Kaloidas, a 61-year-old pensioner with bone cancer, needs costly medicine to keep his otherwise fatal disease at bay.

A serious drought in North Korea requires urgent action to prevent the deaths of children already weakened by widespread malnutrition, the U.N. children's fund, UNICEF, warned Thursday.

"The situation is urgent. But if we act now -– by providing urgently needed expertise and prepositioning supplies -– we can save lives," said UNICEF East Asia Regional Director Daniel Toole.

Heroin use and overdose deaths are rising fast in the United States, particularly among whites and women, U.S. health authorities said Tuesday.

More than 8,200 people died from a heroin-involved overdose in 2013, nearly twice the number of deaths seen just two years earlier, according to the Vital Signs report issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

An Australian has been diagnosed with a deadly "one-in-a-million" degenerative brain condition, but authorities Wednesday stressed it was unrelated to mad cow disease and not contagious.

The man, named by the media as 63-year-old Frank Burton, is in a serious condition in hospital with a likely case of "classical Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)", a spokesman for Sydney Local Health District told Agence France Presse.

Aging is typically studied in the elderly, but a study released Monday said different rates of aging can be detected as early as the mid-20s.

The findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' July 6 issue are based on a group of 954 people born in New Zealand in 1972 or 1973.

Twenty to 80 percent of women questioned in England, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand drank alcohol while pregnant, researchers said Tuesday, flagging a "significant public health concern".

Though most had "low levels" of intake, the data suggested that alcohol use in pregnancy was prevalent and socially pervasive, said a study in the journal BMJ Open.

New regulations aimed at rolling back Brazil's obsession with Cesarean sections took effect Monday, with the government hoping it can steer the country from its status as a world leader in C-section births.

The rules and a campaign called "Childbirth is normal!" address what Health Minister Arthur Chioro has dubbed an "epidemic" of Cesareans, currently accounting for more than half of births in this nation of 200 million.

Overwhelmed by hundreds of sick and wounded each day, hospitals in Yemen's second city Aden have been reduced to hospices lacking medicines and space as the country's bloodshed rages on.

"The world is watching us slowly die," said Abdullah Gahtan, a lawyer lying on a bed at Aden's Al-Sadaka hospital.