Saa Mathias Lenoh, a high school student in the Guinean capital Conakry, says he's "learning to smile little by little," like thousands of other youngsters orphaned by Ebola in west Africa.

According to the United Nations, more than 22,000 children lost at least one parent to the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history whose epicentre lay in the west African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

The United States will launch a "moonshot" effort to cure cancer, President Barack Obama declared Tuesday, assigning his deputy Joe Biden to lead the effort.

Comparing the scale of the challenge to the successful U.S. mission to put an astronaut on the moon, Obama said the drive would receive the same effort as clean energy research. 

Women 50 and older should get a mammogram to screen for breast cancer every two years, while women in their 40s should decide with their doctors, said U.S. guidelines Monday.

The newest recommendations by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force stoked new controversy over what is best for women, who not long ago were urged to get a mammogram every year starting at age 40.

Three people have died of swine flu in Armenia since the start of the year, the country's health ministry said Monday, after an outbreak in neighboring Iran left more than 100 dead.

"All the people who died from the H1N1 virus suffered complications after having sought medical attention too late or already suffered from other diseases," ministry spokeswoman Anahit Haytayan told Agence France Presse.

At least 10 people have died and over 1,000 fallen sick with cholera in an outbreak among Somali refugees in the world's largest refugee camp in Kenya, U.N. officials said Saturday.

The outbreak began in November in the Dadaab camp complex in northeastern Kenya, home to some 350,000 Somali refugees, said Osman Yussuf Ahmed, from the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR.

Guidelines on alcohol intake for men have been slashed by a third in new advice issued by Britain's chief medical officers Friday.

Men are now being told they should drink only 14 units of alcohol per week, the same as for women and down from the previous level of 21 units.

New York officially launches marijuana as a form of medical treatment Thursday, becoming the 23rd U.S. state to do so as the taboo surrounding its legalized medicinal use starts to shift.

Under the legislation, five companies are authorized to grow marijuana for medicinal purposes in the state, but only one -- Bloomfield Industries -- has set up headquarters in New York City itself.

A Cuban migrant's death from the AH1N1 influenza virus has alarmed authorities in Panama, where nearly 1,000 other Cubans are stranded near the border with Costa Rica, according to an official on Tuesday.

The country's health ministry said the 53-year-old Cuban man was taken to a hospital near the border on Saturday and died the next day of "severe respiratory problems" linked to the virus.

Twins share the same genes, and when one gets cancer, the other faces a higher risk of getting sick too, according to a study Tuesday that included 200,000 people.

But just because one twin falls ill does not mean that the other is certain to get the same cancer, or any cancer at all, according the report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Lying on an operating table in northern Tehran, Nazanine says she wants it all: a third nose job, her eyebrows tattooed and liposuction on her thighs to "fix" her figure.

The patient in her 40s "had two nose jobs with another doctor, but wasn't happy and asked us to do it again," says her doctor Javad Amirizad, the latest surgeon to take her under the knife.