The presidents of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone come to the United Nations on Friday hoping to raise $3.2 billion to put their countries firmly on course for recovery from Ebola.

More than 11,200 people have died in West Africa from the world's worst outbreak of the virus, with a few new cases uncovered in Liberia last month after the country had been declared Ebola-free.

A cancer-stricken Arizona girl who got a hefty contribution posted in Taylor Swift's name has received thousands of additional dollars in donations from people wishing her a "swift" recovery.

A GoFundMe fundraising site for 11-year-old Naomi Oakes accumulated more than $73,000 on Thursday, far surpassing its initial goal of $30,000. The largest contribution was the $50,000 donation posted online a day earlier in Swift's name. Since news of that donation spread, the site has gotten more than $6,000.

Officials say a foreigner who tested positive for MERS after arriving in the Philippines from the Middle East is now free of the virus and will leave the hospital this weekend.

Department of Health spokesman Lyndon Lee Suy said Friday the foreigner's close contact, a Filipino woman, is also well but will remain hospitalized until she completes a 14-day quarantine period on July 18.

People who suffer from psychosis are about three times more likely to be smokers, but scientists have long scratched their heads over which one leads to the other.

On Friday, research published in The Lancet Psychiatry suggested daily tobacco use, already known to cause cancer and stroke, may be also be a contributor to mental illness -- not necessarily result of it.

A cheap, oral vaccine provided "significant" protection against cholera in a real-life trial in Bangladesh, where the disease kills thousands every year, scientists reported on Thursday.

The research with nearly 270,000 adults and children in the slums of Mirpur in Dhaka, was the first to demonstrate the drug's effectiveness on-site in an endemic setting, said the authors of a study published in The Lancet.

The World Bank warned Wednesday that the loss of health care workers amid the Ebola epidemic in western Africa could increase women's deaths from complications of pregnancy and childbirth.

An additional 4,022 deaths of women could be seen each year across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the countries hardest hit by the recent Ebola outbreak, the Bank said in a report that looks at the impact beyond the epidemic's direct effects.

Greece's slide to the brink of financial collapse may be abstract to many outsiders, but for the country's chronically sick, it is a matter of life and death.

Yiannis Kaloidas, a 61-year-old pensioner with bone cancer, needs costly medicine to keep his otherwise fatal disease at bay.

A serious drought in North Korea requires urgent action to prevent the deaths of children already weakened by widespread malnutrition, the U.N. children's fund, UNICEF, warned Thursday.

"The situation is urgent. But if we act now -– by providing urgently needed expertise and prepositioning supplies -– we can save lives," said UNICEF East Asia Regional Director Daniel Toole.

Heroin use and overdose deaths are rising fast in the United States, particularly among whites and women, U.S. health authorities said Tuesday.

More than 8,200 people died from a heroin-involved overdose in 2013, nearly twice the number of deaths seen just two years earlier, according to the Vital Signs report issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

An Australian has been diagnosed with a deadly "one-in-a-million" degenerative brain condition, but authorities Wednesday stressed it was unrelated to mad cow disease and not contagious.

The man, named by the media as 63-year-old Frank Burton, is in a serious condition in hospital with a likely case of "classical Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)", a spokesman for Sydney Local Health District told Agence France Presse.