On a sultry March afternoon at Liberia's newly-opened northwestern border, drug enforcement agent Octavius Manning scrutinizes cars as they roll across the bridge from Sierra Leone.

The main crossing point between the west African neighbors, the road over the Mano river at the trading post of Bo Waterside, was closed for six months in a bid to halt the spread of Ebola.

Five U.S. health workers monitored for three weeks by doctors in Nebraska after being exposed to Ebola in West Africa have all been released, officials said Wednesday.

They are all clinicians who worked with Boston-based aid group Partners in Health.

Long viewed as a controversial dark substance, coffee is gaining ground among medical experts who say it can protect against heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and diabetes, even if it is decaffeinated.

Multiple studies published worldwide in recent years have concluded that coffee can be good for the health.

Inciting people to extreme thinness could be punishable by a year in prison and a fine of 10,000 euros ($11,000) in France after MPs voted Thursday to take aim at "pro-anorexia" websites.

Deputies voted through an amendment to a law on public health that would punish anyone "provoking people to excessive thinness by encouraging prolonged dietary restrictions that could expose them to a danger of death or directly impair their health."

Sue Barnes had no problem getting sanitary pads while she grew up in South Africa. But not every girl, she came to realise, is so lucky and their periods weigh over daily life. 

In 2010, Barnes learned that girls from poor families were skipping school each time they were menstruating, because they cannot afford sanitary pads. 

Flaws in computer modelling led to apocalyptic forecasts of how the deadly Ebola virus would spread in West Africa, specialists said.

Many of the models were off-the-shelf software that failed to take into account complexities and uncertainties in the way the disease spread in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, they said on Tuesday.

Ganga Kalshetty was just two years old when India declared itself leprosy-free in 2005, giving her family hope that she would be spared the disfiguring disease and its social stigma.

But the last decade has seen a worrying resurgence of leprosy in India, which now accounts for more than half of the 200,000 new cases reported worldwide every year.

A Spanish hospital said Monday it has successfully carried out the world's most complex face transplant, reconstructing the lower face, neck, mouth, tongue and back of the throat of a man terribly disfigured by disease.

A team of 45 physicians, nurses, anaesthesiologists and other health professionals carried out the 27-hour operation in early February at Barcelona's Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, the hospital said in a statement.

In a move that could heighten the hurdles faced by states attempting to execute prisoners, a leading association for U.S. pharmacists has officially discouraged its members from providing drugs for use in lethal injections.

The policy adopted by American Pharmacists Association delegates at their annual meeting Monday makes an ethical stand against providing such drugs, saying they run contrary to the role of pharmacists as health care providers.

Higher levels of pesticide residue in fruit and vegetables are associated with lower quality of semen, according to a study published on Tuesday.

Its authors said the research was only an early step in what should be a much wider investigation.