Health trends come and go, but one post-birth fad is gaining a foothold in the United States among some new mothers who extol the benefits of eating their own placentas.

Convinced it helps to boost energy, produce healthy milk and ward off postpartum depression, the practice is catching on among mothers who shun modern medicine for natural care, or Hollywood celebrities eager to adopt new-age trends.

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced Friday it had approved a 15-minute test for Ebola that should prove a fast and rugged tool in countries hit by the disease.

The test is a little less accurate than the so-called gold standard of lab assessment, but does not need electricity or highly trained personnel to use it, WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said.

Deaths from the MERS virus have surged in Saudi Arabia, health ministry figures showed on Friday, after authorities warned of a seasonal increase in Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).

The ministry recorded five deaths on Thursday alone, bringing to 16 the number since February 11.

A "superbug" outbreak suspected in the deaths of two Los Angeles hospital patients is raising disturbing questions about the design of a hard-to-clean medical instrument used on more than half a million people in the U.S. every year.

At least seven people — two of whom died — have been infected with a potentially lethal, antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria after undergoing endoscopic procedures at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center between October and January. More than 170 other patients may also have been exposed, hospital officials said.

Parasites resistant to the frontline malaria drug have spread westward from southeast Asia to just short of the Indian border -- a gateway to Africa, researchers warned Friday.

A spread into India "would pose a serious threat to the global control and eradication of malaria," said a statement that accompanied the study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Thailand has passed a law banning foreign couples from using Thai women as surrogates after a series of high-profile scandals tainting the image of the hitherto unregulated industry.

The legislation was unanimously approved by Thailand's junta-picked parliament on Thursday in a bill spurred by the case of an Australian couple accused of abandoning a baby with Down's syndrome while taking his healthy twin sister carried by a Thai surrogate.

Tiny nano-particles that act like miniature drones could deliver a knock-out punch to plaque buildup in the arteries, according to an experimental approach described by US scientists on Wednesday.

So far the anti-cholesterol treatment has been tried only in lab mice, while the nanoparticles themselves are in clinical trials for people with cancer.

A consortium of scientists on Wednesday unveiled the largest-ever map of molecular switches that affect genes, a tool that should boost understanding into how diseases are caused.

The work, assembled by scientific publishing house Nature, is the most ambitious look yet at epigenetics, considered one of medicine's most promising frontiers.

A new vaccine against sexually transmitted human papillomavirus is more effective than the previous version and may protect against 90 percent of all cervical cancers worldwide, researchers said Wednesday.

The vaccine, Gardasil 9, is made by Merck, which also funded the study of 14,200 women aged 16-26, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The World Health Organization on Thursday urged countries to invest billions of dollars to tackle 17 neglected tropical diseases -- including dengue fever, leprosy and sleeping sickness -- which kill 500,000 people globally each year.

WHO said some 1.5 billion people across 149 countries are affected by the diseases, insisting additional investments would save lives, prevent disability, end suffering and improve productivity.