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U.N. Says Niger Cholera Outbreak Kills 51 People

Niger has seen more than 1,300 cases of cholera since the beginning of the year, with 51 people dying of the disease, the United Nations said Monday.

In September alone there were 38 reported deaths from cholera, said the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the capital Niamey on its website.

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Radio in Tribal Languages Spreads Ebola Message

Straining to hear the radio held to his ear, Wesley Wudea gestures for his grandchildren to be silent as he picks up rare tips on Ebola prevention in his own language.

In Liberia, at the center of the west African outbreak, the airwaves are often the best way to disseminate information on the epidemic, yet swathes of the ethnically diverse country do not speak the lingua franca.

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Australia Suspends Immigration from Ebola-hit Nations

Australia said Monday it was suspending migration from Ebola-hit West African nations to try to prevent the virus from crossing its borders, as a teenager who arrived from Guinea tested negative for the disease.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison told parliament the government had stopped issuing visas to people from those countries hit by the disease, which has claimed close to 5,000 lives in its worst outbreak.

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Ebola Drug Maker Fujifilm to Buy U.S. Vaccine Maker

Fujifilm said Monday it would buy a U.S. vaccine maker as the Japanese firm boosts its supply of an experimental Ebola drug to help stem the spread of the virus.

The deal would see Fujifilm take a 49 percent stake in Kalon Biotherapeutics, with plans to buy the whole company "in the future", the company said, without supplying financial details.

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Cocoa Clue to Reversing Memory Loss

Bioactive ingredients found in cocoa sharply reversed age-related memory decline in a group of volunteers, scientists reported on Sunday.

The compounds, called flavanols, were taken in a specially-prepared cocoa drink, according to an experiment published by the journal Nature Neuroscience.

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Gene Link to Seizures in Children after MMR Vaccine

Scientists in Denmark said Sunday they had found genetic clues to explain why a small number of children have febrile seizures -- brief convulsions -- after receiving the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

They stressed there was no need to scrap the MMR vaccine -- caught in a health scare in 1998 that watchdogs later declared groundless -- and described its use as a "great achievement" in saving lives.

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Cambodia-Thai Kidney Trafficking Sparks Fears of New Organ Market

The seven-inch scar runs diagonally across the left flank of his skinny torso, a glaring reminder of an operation he hoped would save his family from debt but instead plunged him into shame.    

Chhay, 18, sold his kidney for $3,000 in an illicit deal that saw him whisked from a rickety one-room house on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh to a gleaming hospital in the medical tourism hub of neighboring Thailand.

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U.S. Envoy Visiting Ebola-Hit Africa Condemns World Response

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations criticized the level of international support for nations hit by Ebola as she began a tour Sunday of west African nations at the epicenter of the deadly outbreak.

Samantha Power said before arriving in Guinea that too many leaders were praising the efforts of countries like the United States and Britain to accelerate aid to the worst-affected nations, but were doing little themselves.

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NY, NJ Order Ebola Quarantine for Doctors, Others

Alarmed by the case of an Ebola-infected New York doctor, the governors of New Jersey and New York on Friday ordered a mandatory, 21-day quarantine of all medical workers and other arriving airline passengers who have had contact with victims of the deadly disease in West Africa.

The first person to fall under the order was a health care worker returning Friday from treating Ebola patients in West Africa. By Friday evening, she had developed a fever and was being evaluated, New Jersey officials said.

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WHO Eyes Mass Ebola Vaccines by Mid-2015

Hundreds of thousands of Ebola vaccine doses could be rolled out to West Africa by mid-2015, the World Health Organization said, after a new case of the virus was reported in New York and a two-year-old girl died in the first case in Mali.

Two American nurses were declared cured of Ebola and one -- Dallas-based Nina Pham -- hugged President Barack Obama at the White House to prove it.

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