Having previously lost two babies to diarrhoea and dysentery, 25-year-old Suman Chandel lies on a bed in a clinic in remote northern India and smiles with relief.

Hours earlier, Chandel gave birth to her fourth child, a seemingly healthy baby boy weighing three kilograms, and is optimistic that this time the chances of survival are good.

New sign-up numbers are showing progress for President Barack Obama's health care law, but not enough to guarantee that Americans who need coverage by New Year's will be able to get it. That means more trouble for the White House after months of repairing a dysfunctional enrollment website.

Next year could start with a new round of political recriminations over the president's signature domestic achievement: bringing the United States as close as it's ever come to universal health care under the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare to its opponents.

Denmark's Financial Supervisory Authority said on Tuesday it had reported insulin world leader Novo Nordisk to the police for having hidden crucial information from its shareholders for two days.

In February, the Danish pharmaceutical company learnt on a Friday evening that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had rejected its applications for two new diabetes treatments, but did not share the information until late on Sunday.

A Chinese scientist working on the H7N9 virus at a disease control laboratory in Changsha, Hunan province, on April 7, 2013

A mutant form of the H7N9 flu virus that is resistant to frontline drugs is just as contagious as its non-resistant counterpart, according to a lab test reported on Tuesday.

Cases of chikungunya have occurred on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, marking the first time the mosquito-borne disease has spread in the western hemisphere, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday.

"As of 10 December 2013, altogether two confirmed, four probable and 20 suspected cases of chikungunya infection have been reported," the WHO said in a statement.

A French study has found heavy imbalances in the number of newborn girls and boys in the Caucasus and west Balkans, indicating parts of the region are rife with selective abortions.

Often associated with China and India, sex-selective abortions have been growing in these regions since the early 1990s, according to the study from the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED).

The Gulf state of Qatar on Tuesday launched a genetic code mapping project for its small population to help in treating diseases.

The "Qatar Genome" project is a "road map for future treatment," said Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the wife of the former emir, at the opening of the World Innovation Summit for Health in Doha.

Uruguay is pushing ahead to create a legal marijuana market despite warnings from educators, psychiatrists and pharmacists of dangerous side effects.

The Senate planned to debate the pot plan Tuesday, with approval by the ruling coalition widely expected before the night is over. Because senators turned away all requests for amendments after it passed the lower chamber, their vote will be final.

A provocative study found that nearly 1 in 5 lung tumors detected on CT scans are probably so slow-growing that they would never cause problems.

These were not false-positives — suspicious results that turn out upon further testing not to be lung cancer, the world's No. 1 cause of cancer deaths. These were indeed cancerous tumors, but ones that caused no symptoms and were unlikely ever to become deadly, the researchers said.

A French court on Tuesday convicted the ex-managers of firm PIP of fraud and sentenced the company's founder to four years after its faulty breast implants sparked a global health scare.

The now-defunct firm, Poly Implant Prothese (PIP), was at the centre of worldwide concern two years ago after it was revealed to have used industrial-grade silicone in thousands of breast implants sold worldwide.