McDonald's in Japan said Friday it was investigating an incident involving a customer who was injured by plastic shards found inside a drink, the latest in a string of food contamination scandals.

The company said it temporarily closed the outlet in Osaka this week, and sent a notice to 95 other restaurants that offer the kind of green tea latte frappe sold to the woman, who said she sustained injuries to her mouth.

Just eight years old, Graciela could become Mexico's first authorized consumer of medical marijuana to alleviate the hundreds of epileptic seizures that strike her small frame every day.

A judge last month gave her desperate parents permission to get a cannabis oil despite the government's opposition in a country engulfed in a bloody drug war.

A cancer-killing therapy that engineers a patient's own immune cells to wipe out chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) has shown long-term success in a handful of people, a US study said Wednesday.

Experts said the approach is on the cutting edge of a growing field known as immunotherapy, which coaxes the body to kill off cancer and may someday revolutionize oncology by ending the use of toxic chemotherapy.

The Food and Drug Administration has issued warning letters to five distributors of pure powdered caffeine, saying the products put consumers at risk.

The letters, which are dated Aug. 27, follow the overdose deaths last year of two young men from Ohio and Georgia.

The World Health Organization on Thursday announced that Liberia, recently ravaged by Ebola, was free of the virus, 42 days after the last confirmed case passed a second negative test.

"WHO declares Liberia free of Ebola virus transmission in the human population," the U.N. health agency said in a statement.

Fifty people have been placed in quarantine in northern Sierra Leone after the death of a middle-aged woman from the Ebola virus, medical officials said Tuesday,  in a setback for the country's bid to gain Ebola-free status.

"We are conducting an epidemiological investigation to trace the extent of the transmission" as the woman ho died was sick for 5-10 days without the authorities being alerted, Ibrahim Sesay of the  National Ebola Response Centre (NERC) told a local radio station.

Three out of four Americans' hearts are older than their chronological age, raising the risk of heart disease, stroke and premature death, officials said Tuesday.

An online tool at www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/heartage.htm can help people determine how old their heart is, based on factors like weight, smoking, diabetes and high blood pressure, said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One more reason to watch the waistline: New research says people's weight in middle age may influence not just whether they go on to develop Alzheimer's disease, but when.

Obesity in midlife has long been suspected of increasing the risk of Alzheimer's. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health took a closer look and reported Tuesday that being overweight or obese at age 50 may affect the age, years later, when Alzheimer's strikes. Among those who eventually got sick, more midlife pounds meant an earlier onset of disease.

Casey Reyes struggled for a way to explain the "sci-fi" surgery doctors were proposing to save her 87-year-old grandfather's badly burned hand.

"They're gonna put your hand inside your stomach, kind of like a hoodie," she told him.

Britain on Tuesday became the first country to implement a vaccination program for all newborn babies against meningitis B, which is fatal in one in 10 cases.

Campaigners hope the vaccine, which will be given to babies at two, four and 12 months old, will prevent up to 4,000 cases by 2025.