Thousands of men around the world are to be sterilized Friday in what organizers have dubbed a global "vasectomy-athon", to encourage men to take a bigger role in family planning.

Some 750 doctors in 25 countries are to perform the procedure on over 3,000 volunteers to mark World Vasectomy Day, with many operations being provided free or at discounted rates.

Doctors at a Bangladesh hospital were treating a baby girl born with two heads on Thursday, medical officials and the newborn's father said.

The baby was born late Wednesday and is now being treated for breathing difficulties after being shifted to the intensive care unit of the country's largest hospital in Dhaka.

More than 230,000 people received a first dose of cholera vaccine in a massive campaign to combat an outbreak of the disease in Iraq, the World Health Organization said Monday.

Over 2,500 cases of cholera have been confirmed in Iraq since the outbreak began, causing two confirmed deaths, according to the WHO.

Omani health authorities have urged caution after a woman who had visited Iraq was found to be infected with cholera, local media reported on Monday. 

"The Omani woman who was diagnosed with the disease had visited Iraq recently," the local Times of Oman daily quoted the health ministry as saying. 

Nestle's hugely popular Maggi noodles returned to shelves in India on Monday five months after the government banned them saying lead levels were too high.

"We are delighted to announce that your beloved Maggi noodles is back. The roll out has begun today," Nestle India said in a statement to the Bombay Stock Exchange.

The World Health Organization is set to announce Saturday that Ebola-ravaged Sierra Leone has beaten an outbreak that killed almost 4,000 of its people and plunged the economy into recession.

The former British colony recorded around half of the cases in an epidemic that has infected 28,600 people across the three hardest-hit west African nations and claimed 11,300 lives since December 2013.

Germany on Friday passed a law banning professional assisted suicide services -- even if practitioners say they do so purely in the interest of suffering people.

Critics warned however that this meant doctors could now face prosecution for helping their terminally ill patients to die.

At least 14 people in western India have lost sight in one eye after botched cataract surgeries, doctors and officials said Thursday, the latest example of poor medical care in the country.

Authorities in the state of Maharashtra blamed hospital staff for failing to sterilize equipment properly and causing the blindness, following what is generally considered to be a low-risk operation.

The Ebola epidemic is expected to be declared over in Sierra Leone on Saturday, when the west African nation will have gone 42 days without any new infections.

But jubilation over ending the outbreak in the impoverished nation, where almost 4,000 deaths have been reported, has been tempered by caution, with neighbouring Guinea still battling the virus. 

France said Wednesday it will lift a ban on gay men giving blood, but only if they abstain from sex in the months beforehand -- an exclusion denounced as discriminatory by rights groups.

"Giving blood is an act of generosity, of civic responsibility, and the donor's sexual orientation cannot be a condition," Health Minister Marisol Touraine said in Paris.