More than two dozen cancer groups say that about half the world's population doesn't have adequate access to painkillers because of restrictive laws meant to combat drug abuse.

In a global survey released on Thursday, The European Society for Medical Oncology and partners estimated millions of cancer patients aren't able to get seven cheap medicines considered essential for pain relief, including codeine and morphine.

Could paying for bone marrow cells really boost the number of donors? The Obama administration is taking steps to block a federal court ruling that had opened a way to find out.

Buying or selling organs has long been illegal, punishable by five years in jail. The 1984 National Organ Transplantation Act that set the payment ban didn't just refer to solid organs — it included bone marrow transplants, too.

Two couples in their 80s have committed suicide in Paris, reigniting a debate in France on euthanasia which is still illegal in the country.

The suicides came just four days apart. The second couple, aged 84 and 81, were found dead on Monday at their apartment in a building in the fashionable seventh district, police said.

The U.S. health regulator has restricted exports from a plant owned by Indian generic drugmaker Wockhardt in the latest ban on its products, sending the company's shares tumbling 14 percent on Wednesday.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration slapped an "import alert" on the company's Chikalthana plant in Maharashtra state, the regulator said in a notice on its website late Tuesday.

A mass vaccination program has been launched in Philippine communities that were devastated by Super Typhoon Haiyan to protect children against measles and polio, U.N. agencies said Wednesday.

The campaign began this week with 30,000 children being vaccinated in Tacloban city, one of the places hardest hit when Haiyan claimed thousands of lives nearly three weeks ago, the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF and World Health Organisation said.

People who start exercise even late in life can reap the benefit in good health, a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine said on Monday.

Researchers tracked the health of nearly 3,500 Britons whose average age was 64, for more than eight years.

Government grants to help poor children in South Africa also play an important role in reducing HIV risk from "sugar daddies" who prey on teenage girls, a study said on Tuesday.

In a wide-ranging probe published in The Lancet Global Health, researchers in Britain and South Africa interviewed 3,500 teenagers and followed this up with another interview a year later.

US authorities on Monday lifted restrictions on the prescription of diabetes drug Avandia after a new study indicated it did not carry an elevated risk of heart attacks.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the decision after considering the recommendations made by a 26-member panel of experts on June 6.

Research into medications to treat mental health disorders, which affect almost a quarter of the U.S. population, has slowed as major pharmaceutical companies cut back investment in this area, psychiatrists say.

"The companies seem to have concluded that developing new psychiatric drugs is too risky and too expensive," said Richard Friedman, professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.

Rodico Basilides visits a forlorn cross that stands as a memorial to his family who died in the catastrophic Philippine typhoon, one of countless survivors who are being forced to grieve without professional counselling.

"This is for my wife, Gladys, and four children. They were swept away by the waves," Basilides, 42, said as he stood alongside the cross made of two sticks tied together with green string on the floor of what used to be his seaside home.