A man who was left brain-dead after suffering serious side-effects during a drugs trial in France died on Sunday, according to the hospital which had been treating him.

Five other volunteers hospitalized a week ago when the drugs trial went wrong were "in a stable condition," the hospital in the western city of Rennes said in a statement.

Sierra Leone's government on Saturday urged the public not to panic as it announced that more than 100 people had been quarantined following a new death from Ebola just as the country seemed to have overcome the epidemic.

The World Health Organization on Friday confirmed that a 22-year-old woman who died after falling ill near the Guinean border last week had tested positive for the tropical fever.

French authorities launched three investigations Saturday at a research laboratory in Rennes after a drug trial conducted there left one person brain-dead and three others facing potentially irreversible brain damage.

Judicial police late Friday carried out the first searches at the Biotrial lab which had performed the trial on behalf of Portuguese pharmaceutical company Bial.

Ecuador said Friday it has detected its first two cases of the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease similar to dengue fever that has been linked to birth defects.

Ecuadoran officials had previously detected four people who arrived from other countries with the disease, which is spreading through Latin America and the Caribbean.

The United States warned pregnant women Friday to avoid travel to 14 countries and territories in the Caribbean and Latin America due to the mosquito-borne Zika virus, linked to birth defects.

"The virus is spreading fairly rapidly through the Americas," said Lyle Petersen, director of the division of vector-borne infectious diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a conference call with reporters.

A "serious accident" during a drugs trial in France has left one person brain-dead and five hospitalized, Health Minister Marisol Touraine said Friday.

She said the six had been taking part in a "trial of an oral medication being developed by a European laboratory" in the northwestern city of Rennes.

A woman in Sierra Leone is thought to have died from Ebola, officials said Thursday, just hours after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an end to an epidemic of the disease.

The female student was taken ill in the northern village of Bamoi Luma near the Guinean border and died soon after, with an initial swab testing positive for Ebola, a senior health ministry official told Agence France Presse. 

A Swedish-Ugandan study has found that mosquito nets can be used as an inexpensive alternative to costly surgical meshes in fixing common groin hernias, Stockholm's Karolinska Institute announced Thursday.

"Commercial hernia meshes cost $100 or more, which is too much for the health services and people living in poor countries," said Jenny Lofgren, a researcher for the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Turkmenistan's authorities have forced shops to stop selling cigarettes, traders in Ashgabat said Thursday, after its president urged citizens to kick the habit. 

State anti-narcotics officials "came to our shop recently and forced us to remove cigarettes from the shelves, threatening us with huge fines," said Bairam Saryev, the 34-year-old owner of a small store in the capital.

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced Thursday that the Ebola epidemic that has ravaged west Africa for two years was over after Liberia, the last affected country, received the all-clear.

"Today the World Health Organization declares the end of the most recent outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia and says all known chains of transmission have been stopped in West Africa," the U.N. health agency said.