A new drug to treat advanced skin cancer, or metastatic melanoma, has been shown to nearly double average survival time in a study of more than 130 patients, researchers said Wednesday.

Made by Genentech, a U.S. subsidiary of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, the drug, Zelboraf, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in August 2011, making it the first new treatment for melanoma in 13 years.

An outbreak of Lassa fever has killed 40 people and infected dozens of others in a third of Nigeria's 36 states over the past six weeks, a senior health official said Wednesday.

"We have 40 deaths, including two doctors and six nurses, from lassa fever which broke out in 12 states in the past six weeks," health ministry's chief epidemiologist Henry Akpan told Agence France Presse.

Some 157,000 children aged 11 to 15 start smoking every year in England, the charity Cancer Research UK said Wednesday, while almost one million -- or 27 percent of the total -- have tried smoking at least once.

The child smokers who acquire the habit each year would fill 5,200 classrooms, the charity said as it campaigns for branding-free packaging on tobacco products.

A traditional Chinese medicine company at the heart of an angry Internet campaign accusing it of violating animal welfare opened one of its controversial bear bile farms to journalists on Wednesday.

Bear bile has long been used in China to treat various health problems, despite skepticism over its effectiveness and outrage over the bile extraction process, which animal rights group say is excruciatingly painful for bears.

Deaths from liver-destroying hepatitis C are on the rise, and new data shows baby boomers especially should take heed — they are most at risk.

Federal health officials are considering whether anyone born between 1945 and 1965 should get a one-time blood test to check if their livers harbor this ticking time bomb. The reason: Two-thirds of people with hepatitis C are in this age group, most unaware that a virus that takes a few decades to do its damage has festered since their younger days.

U.S. health authorities said Tuesday they will import a drug to treat ovarian, bone marrow and AIDS-related skin cancer from India in order to ward off a worrying shortage.

"Lipodox will be imported as an alternative to Doxil," the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in a statement, noting that a temporary deal has been made with Sun Pharma Global FZE in India to supply U.S. patients with the drug.

International funding cuts threaten to deepen an HIV crisis in Myanmar, where tens of thousands of people are denied lifesaving treatment, an aid agency said Wednesday.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said only a third of the 120,000 people in need of antiretroviral drugs in Myanmar were receiving the therapy, with up to 20,000 people dying each year due to a lack of treatment.

Monkeys suffering from Parkinson's disease show a marked improvement when human embryonic stem cells are implanted in their brains, in what a Japanese researcher said Wednesday was a world first.

A team of scientists transplanted the stem cells into four primates that were suffering from the debilitating disease.

Biological research increasingly debunks the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish, a leading specialist in primate behavior told a major science conference Monday.

"Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies," Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Stars who knock back whisky, wine or beer in a movie are an invisible but potent force in prompting youngsters to experiment with alcohol or binge-drink, a large U.S. study published on Tuesday suggests.

Major exposure to scenes of alcohol consumption in movies is a bigger risk for teen drinking than having parents who drink or if booze is easily available at home, it says.