The U.N.'s health agency on Tuesday declared Guinea's Ebola outbreak over two years after it emerged, spreading death across west Africa and pushing the region's worst-hit communities to the brink of collapse.

One of the poorest nations in the world, the former French colony was the host for "patient zero" -- an infant who became the first victim -- and health authorities went on to record some 2,500 deaths.

A swine flu outbreak in Iran has killed 112 people since mid-November and the country's first medical worker has died of the virus, media said on Monday.

"About 1,190 people have been diagnosed with the (H1N1) virus and hospitalised" and "the death toll has reached 112", state news agency IRNA quoted a health ministry official as saying.

South Korea announced Wednesday the official end to a deadly outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) that killed 36 people and sparked widespread panic in Asia's fourth-largest economy.

Seoul's health ministry cited "no further risk" of infection, about seven months after the first case was diagnosed in May.

Interpol seized counterfeit drugs worth $7 million in September in an operation encompassing 13 Asian countries, the international police organisation said Monday.

Medication including antibiotics, anti-hypertension pills and even rabies vaccines were taken from hundreds of pharmacies and markets, including dozens of online pharmacies, as Interpol attempts to curb the widespread sale of fake drugs being produced in the region.

The United States on Monday formally lifted its lifetime ban on blood donations by gay men, replacing the rule with a 12-month waiting period after last sexual contact.

The decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration brings U.S. policy in line with several other developed nations, including France, Japan and Australia, which all recently moved to allow men who have sex with men (MSM) to donate blood, as long as they have not had intimate relations in the past year.

An Australian law requiring cigarettes to be sold in plain packaging has received a boost after an international tribunal said it would not hear a tobacco company's legal challenge.

The government in Canberra on Friday welcomed the decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration to refuse jurisdiction over a case brought by smoking giant Philip Morris.

Environmental factors such as sunshine and tobacco smoke cause more cancers than random DNA mutations, researchers have affirmed -- contesting another team's conclusions that "bad luck" was mainly to blame.

The study, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, was conducted to challenge a controversy-stirring paper carried by U.S.-based Science in January, which said unavoidable errors in gene coding was the main cancer cause.

An outbreak of swine flu has claimed 57 lives since mid-November in Iran, where hundreds of people have been diagnosed with the virus, the health ministry said Tuesday.

"Around 900 patients have been diagnosed with the H1N1 flue virus across the country," the head of the ministry's communicable diseases department, Mohammad Mehdi, told Agence France Presse.

"If I'd known, I'd never have taken this pill," says Felicitas Rohrer, who is suing German pharmaceuticals giant Bayer, claiming its oral contraceptive Yasminelle caused her to suffer a pulmonary embolism.

The accusations against Bayer's contraceptive pills Yasminelle and Yaz, based on drospirenone, are not new and the company has already paid out nearly two billion dollars (1.8 billion euros) to around 10,000 women in out-of-court settlements in the United States to avoid long and costly trials.

Guatemala is considering compensation for the family of three people who were victims of a 1940s U.S.-led medical experiment in which hundreds were infected with syphilis, Vice President Alfonso Fuentes said Monday.

"They have been heard and what they are asking for is some form of damages," Fuentes told reporters, adding that the government was studying the option of providing "financial and moral" reparation.