A U.S. girl whose public appeal for an adult lung donation thrust her into the media spotlight nearly died after her body rejected the organs and she has since had a rare second transplant, her mother said Friday.

Sarah Murnaghan, 10, suffers from cystic fibrosis and was said to have very little time left when her parents sued to change the rules and let her be on the list for adult lung donations, usually restricted to those 12 and over.

Virologists are casting a worried eye on this year's Islamic hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia as they struggle with the enigmatic, deadly virus known as MERS which is striking hardest in the kingdom.

Little is known about the new pathogen, beyond the fact that it can be lethal by causing respiratory problems, pneumonia and kidney failure. It can be transmitted between humans, but unlike its cousin, the SARS virus, which sparked a scare a decade ago, it does not seem very contagious.

The mood-stabilizing drug lithium reduces suicide risk by more than 60 percent among people with depression, a study said Thursday.

Lithium has long been prescribed to treat uni-polar disorder (also called clinical depression) and bipolar disorder (manic depression) -- but its use has been declining in many countries, according to Andrea Cipriani, who co-wrote the paper in the online journal bmj.com

Eating a portion of tuna, salmon, sardines or other oily fish once or twice a week reduces the risk of breast cancer, according to a review published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on Thursday.

Researchers based in China looked at 26 previously published studies covering more than 800,000 volunteers in the United States, Europe and Asia whose health was monitored and who gave details about their eating habits.

A gene scorecard may one day help predict which youngsters are likely to grow out of childhood asthma and which will have the disease in adulthood, a study said on Thursday.

Asthma is one of the commonest disorders among children in developed countries and is spreading fast in emerging economies.

The British government on Thursday said it would pursue a radical fertility technique that uses DNA from three parents to create an embryo.

The IVF-based technique is designed to avoid serious mitochondrial diseases inherited on the maternal side, such as muscular dystrophy.

Bellies wobbling and chubby limbs swinging, dozens of sweaty traffic cops exercise to the rhythm of Thai pop songs as part of a scheme to reduce the number of overweight police in Bangkok.

Poor diets and long hours in a sedentary job on the city's gridlocked streets have left the Thai capital's traffic police prone to piling on the pounds.

Shanghai has reported another death from H7N9 bird flu, the local government said, bringing the total number of fatalities nationwide to at least 40.

A 56-year-old man, the husband of an earlier victim, died on Wednesday, the Shanghai government said. He had been hospitalized since April.

Not only has America's high level of C-sections finally stopped rising, but more of the operations are taking place closer to the mother's due date, a new government report found.

Figures released Thursday show what appears to be a significant shift in when pregnant women have cesarean sections. Experts called the change great news — apparent evidence that doctors and women have absorbed warnings about the risks of C-sections and the importance of waiting to deliver until the baby is full-term.

Japan has given the green light to the world's first clinical trial using stem cells harvested from a patient's own body, officials said Thursday, testing a treatment that may offer hope to millions of people robbed of their sight.

A government committee approved proposals for tests aimed at treating age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a common medical condition that causes blindness in older people, using "induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells", a health ministry official said.