Measles is in the news, but it's just one of more than a dozen preventable — and sometimes forgotten — diseases targeted by vaccines for children.

Most immunizations start in infancy and some include multiple doses over several months or years. The government recommends 13 vaccines against 16 diseases, through age 18.

It is universally acknowledged that the New York subway is grubby. What may come as a shock is that it contains DNA fragments linked to anthrax and bubonic plague.

Researchers from Cornell University have provided the first map of the subway's microbes, identifying more than 1,688 types of bacteria and one station that even supports a "marine ecosystem."

Canada's supreme court on Friday unanimously struck down a ban on doctor-assisted suicide for mentally competent adults suffering from an incurable disease, reversing a decision on the books since 1993.

The ruling was, however, suspended for one year to allow lawmakers an opportunity to enact new rules surrounding the divisive issue.

As vaccine skeptics fight laws that would force more parents to inoculate their kids, they are finding unexpected allies in conservative Republicans.

Though the stereotype of a vaccine skeptic is a coastal, back-to-the-land type, it's generally been Democratic-controlled states that have tightened vaccination laws. This week, Democrats in two of those states — California, where a measles outbreak was traced to Disneyland, and Washington state — proposed eliminating laws that allow parents to opt out of vaccination for personal reasons.

Thousands of travelers to the Caribbean and nearby regions are coming home with an unwanted souvenir: a mosquito-borne virus that recently settled there.

The virus, called chikungunya (chih-kihn-GOON'-yuh), causes severe, often disabling joint pain, and few U.S. doctors are prepared to recognize its signs.

For the first time since the west African Ebola outbreak began over a year ago, a clinical trial with a candidate treatment has yielded "encouraging" results, researchers announced Thursday.

The trial with 80 patients in Guinea resulted in fewer deaths and faster recovery rates, the French government and medical research agency Inserm said of tests with the Japanese-manufactured anti-viral drug favipiravir.

Tens of millions of U.S. patients' information such as Social Security numbers have been stolen from Anthem, the company said Wednesday, in the worst hacking revealed by a health insurer to date.

"Cyber attackers executed a very sophisticated attack to gain unauthorized access to one of Anthem’s IT systems and have obtained personal information relating to consumers and Anthem employees who are currently covered, or who have received coverage in the past," a statement from the second-largest U.S. health insurer said.

The largest U.S. measles outbreak in recent history isn't the one that started in December at Disneyland. It happened months earlier in Ohio's Amish country, where 383 people fell ill after unvaccinated Amish missionaries traveled to the Philippines and returned with the virus.

The Ohio episode drew far less attention, even though the number of cases was almost four times that of the Southern California outbreak, because it seemed to pose little threat outside close-knit religious communities.

A high-security federal laboratory made a frightening mistake in sending certain Ebola samples to a lab with fewer safeguards, but an investigation concludes that the samples probably did not contain live virus.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday released the results of its internal investigation of the December 22 incident in Atlanta.

U.S. researchers have found a way to turn a common smartphone into a quick and easy device to conduct field tests for HIV and syphilis.

Using an attachment that costs $34 to make -- a far cry from the standard $18,000 for diagnostic tests -- blood drops are tested for the diseases' antibodies in minutes instead of hours, said the research led by Columbia University engineers.