Merck & Co. on Thursday won the first U.S. approval for a new kind of cancer drug with big advantages over chemotherapy and other older cancer treatments.

The Food and Drug Administration said it has granted accelerated approval to Merck's Keytruda, for treating melanoma that's spread or can't be surgically removed, in patients previously treated with another melanoma drug called Yervoy.

World health experts will meet in Geneva on Friday for the second day of urgent talks on fast-tracking experimental Ebola drugs as doctors in the worst-hit countries pleaded to be given the serums.

With no fully tested treatments for Ebola, the World Health Organization has endorsed potential cures like ZMapp to be rushed out.

Myanmar, which only recently emerged from a half-century of dictatorship and self-imposed isolation, has one of the world's worst health care systems, with tens of thousands dying each year because treatment is lacking for many diseases, including AIDS.

Though international aid has been flowing into the country since 2011, when military rulers handed over power to a nominally civilian government, the country remains one of the hardest places to get care for HIV. Of the estimated 190,000 people who lived with the virus last year, only around a third were receiving treatment, and more than 15,000 died from the disease, according to UNAIDS.

One person commits suicide every 40 seconds, an avoidable tragedy that fails to grab attention because of taboos and stigma, a UN report said Thursday.

In a study released three weeks after the apparent suicide of Hollywood great Robin Williams, the World Health Organization also warned that media reporting of suicide details raises the risk of copycat behavior.

The hospital in Liberia where three American aid workers got sick with Ebola has been overwhelmed by a surge in patients and doesn't have enough hazard suits and other supplies to keep doctors and nurses safe, a missionary couple told The Associated Press.

The latest infection — of Dr. Rick Sacra, an obstetrician who wasn't even working in the hospital's Ebola unit — shows just how critical protective gear is to containing the deadly epidemic, and how charities alone can't handle the response, they said Wednesday.

Google backed life sciences firm Calico and bio-pharmaceutical titan AbbVie on Wednesday announced an alliance to invest $1.5 billion to find ways to battle age-related diseases.

Under the agreement, the companies will combine strengths to discover, develop and bring to market new therapies for illnesses that afflict people as they get old.

Tokyo on Thursday closed most of Yoyogi Park, a popular green spot in the Japanese metropolis, after dengue-carrying mosquitoes were found there, an official said.

The outbreak is the first in 70 years in Japan and has so far infected 55 people, including a young model who has posed for Japanese Playboy and had been sent to the park for a photo shoot.

Nearly three billion people risk ill health and early death merely from breathing the air in their homes that is polluted by fires made for cooking and heating, researchers said.

Some 40 percent of the world's population, mainly in Africa and Asia, use wood, charcoal or coal to cook, warm and light their homes, according to a review published by The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal.

Women fighting cancer in one breast don't benefit from having both breasts removed, according to new research out Tuesday, that found long-term survival was equivalent after targeted surgery plus radiation.

Hollywood star Angelina Jolie famously announced last year she had a double mastectomy to reduce her risk of one day developing breast cancer, because she has a genetic mutation that substantially increases breast cancer risk.

International medical agency Medecins sans Frontieres said the world was "losing the battle" to contain Ebola as the United Nations warned of severe food shortages in the hardest-hit countries.

MSF told a U.N. briefing in New York that world leaders were failing to address the epidemic and called for an urgent global biological disaster response to get aid and personnel to west Africa.