Pfizer has stopped selling its Prevnar 7 pneumonia vaccine in China after its import license expired, but the U.S. drugmaker still intends to launch the world's most widely used vaccine, Prevnar 13, in that market.

The world's second-biggest drugmaker by revenue said that it stopped sales immediately, a decision that affected about 200 of Pfizer's 9,000 employees in China. Pfizer said the jobs for those employees will be eliminated, but they will be encouraged to seek other work with the company in China.

French deputies on Friday voted to ban ultra-thin catwalk models, despite howls of protest from modelling agencies in the world's fashion capital.

"Anyone whose body mass index... is below a certain level will not be able to work as a catwalk model," according to the amendment voted in the National Assembly lower house of parliament.

On a sultry March afternoon at Liberia's newly-opened northwestern border, drug enforcement agent Octavius Manning scrutinizes cars as they roll across the bridge from Sierra Leone.

The main crossing point between the west African neighbors, the road over the Mano river at the trading post of Bo Waterside, was closed for six months in a bid to halt the spread of Ebola.

Five U.S. health workers monitored for three weeks by doctors in Nebraska after being exposed to Ebola in West Africa have all been released, officials said Wednesday.

They are all clinicians who worked with Boston-based aid group Partners in Health.

Long viewed as a controversial dark substance, coffee is gaining ground among medical experts who say it can protect against heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and diabetes, even if it is decaffeinated.

Multiple studies published worldwide in recent years have concluded that coffee can be good for the health.

Inciting people to extreme thinness could be punishable by a year in prison and a fine of 10,000 euros ($11,000) in France after MPs voted Thursday to take aim at "pro-anorexia" websites.

Deputies voted through an amendment to a law on public health that would punish anyone "provoking people to excessive thinness by encouraging prolonged dietary restrictions that could expose them to a danger of death or directly impair their health."

Sue Barnes had no problem getting sanitary pads while she grew up in South Africa. But not every girl, she came to realise, is so lucky and their periods weigh over daily life. 

In 2010, Barnes learned that girls from poor families were skipping school each time they were menstruating, because they cannot afford sanitary pads. 

Flaws in computer modelling led to apocalyptic forecasts of how the deadly Ebola virus would spread in West Africa, specialists said.

Many of the models were off-the-shelf software that failed to take into account complexities and uncertainties in the way the disease spread in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, they said on Tuesday.

Ganga Kalshetty was just two years old when India declared itself leprosy-free in 2005, giving her family hope that she would be spared the disfiguring disease and its social stigma.

But the last decade has seen a worrying resurgence of leprosy in India, which now accounts for more than half of the 200,000 new cases reported worldwide every year.

A Spanish hospital said Monday it has successfully carried out the world's most complex face transplant, reconstructing the lower face, neck, mouth, tongue and back of the throat of a man terribly disfigured by disease.

A team of 45 physicians, nurses, anaesthesiologists and other health professionals carried out the 27-hour operation in early February at Barcelona's Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, the hospital said in a statement.