North Korea has reopened its borders to tourists and lifted strict quarantine measures four months after it banned most foreign travel to the country due to fears over the deadly Ebola virus.

Tour agencies specialising in trips to the reclusive nation, said they had been told Tuesday the travel ban was over and they could resume bookings for March.

Three suspected cases of swine flu were discovered in the southern city of Tyre, reported MTV on Monday.

It said that one of the patients' health “had declined dramatically.”

Five Japanese men became sick after eating poisonous puffer fish, an official said Tuesday, the latest victims of a delicacy seen as sophisticated by fans and crazy by others.

The men, all in their 40s and 50s, dined at a restaurant in western Wakayama city on Friday night, the city's health official said.

The Japanese company behind an experimental Ebola treatment says it offers new hope for thousands of people infected with the deadly virus in west Africa, but acknowledged it is "not a miracle drug".

In their first comments to media since the release of early clinical trials last week, executives from Fujifilm's drug unit Toyama Chemical said the results were a "good first step" that could lead to larger and better-designed trials.

The death toll from a cholera epidemic in Mozambique that broke out after widespread flooding has risen by almost 50 percent in two weeks to 41, health officials said Monday.

And the number of new cholera infections has more than doubled over the past fortnight.

North Korea is set to lift a four-month ban on foreign tourism imposed over concerns of the spread of the deadly Ebola virus, a Beijing-based tour group said Monday.

Koryo Tours, one of the handful of agencies running regular tours to the North, said it had been contacted by the National Tourism Administration in Pyongyang with news that there was "some movement" over the current travel ban.

Sierra Leone's Vice President Sam Sumana has placed himself in quarantine following the Ebola death of one of his guards, a government spokesman said Saturday, as the country reintroduced travel restrictions as the number of new cases rises again.

Sumana "has decided to place himself in precautionary quarantine awaiting the results of tests by the health authorities", the spokesman said.

Chronic fatigue syndrome is a disease with distinct stages that can be identified through biomarkers in the blood, researchers said Friday, offering hope that earlier diagnosis may improve treatment.

Scientists at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health said their findings represent "the first robust physical evidence" that the syndrome is "a biological illness as opposed to a psychological disorder, and the first evidence that the disease has distinct stages."

People who use personal audio players should consider limiting their use to one hour a day and turn down the volume to prevent permanent hearing loss, the World Health Organization said Friday.

The U.N. agency said young people are particularly at risk. with data from middle- and high-income countries showing that almost half of all 12- to 35-year-olds listen to their personal audio devices or cellphones at unsafe volumes. About 40 percent of young people are also exposed to damaging sound levels at nightclubs, bars and sporting events.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on Friday praised President Barack Obama's "extraordinary" leadership in the fight against the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

With Liberia now in recovery from the worst outbreak ever of the deadly virus, the United States ended its military mission in the region Thursday.