Sierra Leone said on Thursday it was ending the "risk allowances" it has been paying to thousands of healthcare workers on the front line of its battle with Ebola.

Steven Gaojia, the co-ordinator of the government's response to the outbreak, told reporters the payments of up to 500,000 leones ($118, 102 euros) a week on top of regular salaries would finish by the end of March.

Lori Simons took the bright orange pill at 3 a.m. Eight hours later, doctors sliced into her brain, looking for signs that the drug was working.

She is taking part in one of the most unusual cancer experiments in the nation. With special permission from the Food and Drug Administration and multiple drug companies, an Arizona hospital is testing medicines very early in development and never tried on brain tumors before.

Seventy people have been infected in a measles outbreak that led California public health officials to urge those who haven't been vaccinated against the disease, including children too young to be immunized, should avoid Disney parks where the spread originated.

New infections linked to the theme parks emerged Wednesday in the outbreak that has spread to five U.S. states and Mexico, though the vast majority — 62 — occurred in California.

The $42 billion Gates Foundation says the lives of poor people around the world will improve more over the next 15 years "than at any time in history."

Bill and Melinda Gates in an interview laid out the vision for the world's largest charitable foundation as they prepared to travel to the World Economic Forum and its annual networking meeting of heads of state and business leaders.

A four-year-old Australian boy has been fitted with an artificial pancreas in what researchers said was a world first treatment for managing type 1 diabetes.

Xavier Hames became the first patient following clinical trials to use the new device, which looks like an mp3 player and is attached to his body using several tubes inserted under the skin.

Nigeria on Wednesday confirmed that five states have been hit with the H5N1 strain of bird flu, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of poultry but no human cases.

Agriculture Minister Akinwumi Adesina said the first cases were confirmed on a commercial farm in the northern city of Kano and at a live bird market in Lagos State on January 8.

Inside a ramshackle and once-abandoned pharmacy in Donetsk in Ukraine's war zone, Doctor Andrei Volkov is thrilled. Medicine -- 150 bags of it -- has just arrived. 

But Volkov won't earn any money from it. He plans to give it away for free.

A U.S. study out Tuesday including more than 23,000 children has debunked the long-standing belief that living in the inner city raises the risk of asthma.

Instead, it found that being poor, African-American or Puerto Rican were more significant risk factors for asthma than urban living, said the findings by researchers at the John Hopkins University.

A lethal health crisis is brewing in Russian-annexed Crimea and war-torn eastern Ukraine, where injecting drug users have lost access to therapy to wean them off heroin, the U.N.'s AIDS envoy said Wednesday.

Out of 805 people in Crimea who before annexation were receiving opioid substitution therapy (OST) -- a tried and tested U.N.-backed treatment -- "between 80 and 100" have now died, Michel Kazatchkine told journalists.

Better techniques and policies have given children born from artificial fertilization a much better chance of survival and good health, a Scandinavian study said Wednesday.

Doctors looked at data from 1988 to 2007 from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden for more than 92,000 children born through assisted reproduction technology (ART), the term for in-vitro and other methods.