A 27-year-old U.S. woman from New York state who killed her five-year-old son by poisoning him with salt was jailed for 20 years on Wednesday.

Judge Robert Neary said while Lacey Spears suffered from the mental illness known as Munchausen by proxy, she was guilty of a crime "unfathomable in its cruelty."

A Japanese research team said Thursday it had developed a field test for Ebola that gives results in just over 11 minutes -- down from the 90-minute test used now.

The breakthrough by Nagasaki University's Institute of Tropical Medicine will allow medics to move much more quickly in treating people with the haemorrhagic fever, Professor Jiro Yasuda told Agence France Presse.

The United Nations launched a food safety campaign Tuesday for an era in which millions are dying of hunger or tainted produce even as more and more people fall ill from eating too much.

"Food safety, quality and quantity must go together," Margaret Chan, director general of the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO), said at Paris' Rungis wholesale market, where she launched World Health Day 2015 under the theme: "From farm to plate, make food safe."

Two turkey farms in Canada have been placed under quarantine after H5 bird flu was detected in one of them, Canadian health authorities said.

The Canadian agency responsible for food inspections said it was conducting further tests to determine the precise strain of the virus and the severity of the infection.

Workers in Chile began harvesting the country's first medical marijuana crop Tuesday, breaking new ground in cancer treatment in a nation where cannabis is outlawed as a hard drug.

With the blessing of local authorities, the Daya Foundation, a charitable group, began harvesting some 400 plants sown last October under a special permit to extract cannabis oil to be given free of charge to 200 cancer patients as pain treatment.

Sierra Leone said on Tuesday it had wrongly reported Ebola as the cause of a baby's death in a part of west African country which had been declared free of the virus weeks ago.

Villagers in the eastern district of Kailahun were dismayed when the government said on Monday a nine-month-old boy had tested positive after his death, more then three months after the last confirmed Ebola case.  

Trying to slim down? Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig scored the best marks for effectiveness in a review of research on commercial diet programs, but many other plans just haven't been studied enough to evaluate long-term results.

The two plans are among the most popular and had the best evidence that dieters could lose meaningful amounts of weight and keep it off for at least a year, the review authors said.

Vigorous exercise, the kind that makes you sweat, get red in the face and breathe hard, may be better than moderate exercise when it comes to living longer, researchers said Monday.

According to a study by Australian researchers based on more than 200,000 adults over age 45, and is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine.

A hospital operator denied allegations of poor training and improper preparation in seeking dismissal of a lawsuit by a nurse who contracted Ebola while caring for the first U.S. patient to succumb to the deadly disease.

Texas Health Resources filed a response Friday to the March 2 lawsuit by nurse Nina Pham, The Dallas Morning News reported Saturday (http://bit.ly/1GcgoEy ).

A man who in August became the second person in France to receive a much-hyped new-generation artificial heart said in his first interview Sunday he had "recovered", to the point of going on bike rides.

The 69-year-old man, who wishes to remain anonymous, was terminally ill with a heart condition when he received the transplant exactly eight months ago in the western city of Nantes.