Liberia's leader has sacked ministers and senior government officials who defied an order to return to the west African nation to lead the fight against the deadly Ebola outbreak, her office said on Tuesday.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had told overseas ministers to return within a week as part of a state-of-emergency announcement on August 6, warning that extraordinary measures were needed "for the very survival of our state".

Water-starved South Asian nations have devised their own answer to the Ice Bucket Challenge taking the social media world by storm, instead filling buckets with rice and other supplies for the needy.

Since June, thousands of people worldwide have doused themselves with a bucket of icy water, then posted a video recording of the stunt online and challenged others to do the same or pledge a donation.

Mice that were raised in a sterile environment or given antibiotics early in life lacked a common gut bacteria that appears to prevent food allergies, U.S. researchers said Monday.

The bacterium, called Clostridia, appears to minimize the likelihood that rodents will become allergic to peanuts, and researchers would like to find out if it does the same in people.

Children born to women who took antidepressants during pregnancy are statistically likelier to develop the mental disorder called ADHD, researchers said on Tuesday.

ADHD is a condition blamed for severe and frequent bouts of inattention, hyperactivity or impulsivity, often leading to problems in socializing and education. Children and young adolescents are most frequently diagnosed with it.

Children who spend more than four hours a day on their mobile phone perform significantly worse on school tests than those who are limited to just 30 minutes, a Japanese government survey has found.

Among the nearly one-in-nine 14 and 15-year-olds who use their handheld device for at least four hours daily, grade scores suffer an average 14 percentage points across all subjects.

Doctors in India have removed the skeleton of a foetus that had been inside a woman for 36 years in what is believed to be the world's longest ectopic pregnancy, a doctor has said.

The 60-year-old woman became pregnant at the age of 24 but suffered a miscarriage because the foetus had been growing outside of her uterus, the doctor told AFP on Monday.

The U.N.'s new pointman on Ebola said Monday the fight against the epidemic was a "war" which could take another six months, and warned that airlines boycotting the region were hampering the response.

David Nabarro, a British physician the United Nations has appointed to coordinate the global response to the crisis, was in Sierra Leone's capital Freetown for the fifth day of a tour of the region.

When Niki Quasney felt a piercing pain in her ribcage in March, the oncologist treating her advanced ovarian cancer told her to get to an emergency room immediately.

But instead of making the short drive to a hospital near her home in Munster, Indiana, she drove alone for more than 40 minutes to one in neighboring Illinois. Quasney said she was "terrified" her local hospital might not allow her and her partner of more than 13 years, whom she wed last year in another state, to be together if she suffered a health emergency.

Sixteen tonnes of medical equipment donated by the U.S. government arrived on Sunday in Liberia, which has tallied the highest death toll in the West African epidemic.

Kai Olsen, from the U.S. Agency for International Development, said the shipment included plastic sheeting to build temporary shelters and water purification kits.

E-cigarettes should be subject to the same regulations as cigarettes and should not be sold to minors, the American Heart Association (AHA) said in new policy guidelines out Monday.

The use of e-cigarettes, which are electrical devices that heat flavored nicotine liquid into a vapor that is inhaled, much like traditional cigarettes but without the smoke, has been rising rapidly among youths in recent years, raising concerns about the potential for addiction risks and health damage.