A lab worker may have been exposed to a live sample of the deadly Ebola virus, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday, adding the accident is under investigation.

The technician is not currently showing any symptoms of the hemorrhagic fever, which has killed more than 7,500 people in an outbreak in West Africa. 

A lawyer representing a 17-week-old fetus living inside the clinically dead body of its mother says the unborn child's right to life trumps the woman's right to a dignified death.

Conor Dignam made his closing arguments Wednesday to three Dublin High Court judges who must decide whether Ireland's anti-abortion laws permit the woman's life support machines to be turned off. Their judgment is expected Friday.

U.S. Federal officials have moved closer to overturning a decades-old ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men, but activists say the proposed alternative would continue to stigmatize men who have sex with men.

The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday it will recommend lifting the lifetime ban early next year, replacing it with a policy barring donations from men who have had sex with another man in the previous 12 months. The change would overturn a 31-year-old policy that many medical groups and gay activists say is no longer justified, given advances in HIV testing.

A village chief has become the first person in Sierra Leone to be jailed under laws aimed at preventing the spread of the Ebola virus, court officials and lawyers said Tuesday.

Amadu Kargbo was sentenced to six months in jail by a court in the southwestern city of Moyamba for secretly burying the dead and failing to report a sick patient, court official Foday Fofanah told Agence France Presse.

India's birth rate declined dramatically in the last two decades due in part to rising female literacy, a new study shows, but experts warned against complacency in the country of 1.2 billion.

The Total Fertility Rate -- the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime based on current trends -- fell to just 2.3 last year from 3.6 in 1991, according to official figures released on Monday.

The Food and Drug Administration is building a legal case against companies that sell pure powdered caffeine, which can be fatal even in small doses.

The FDA warned consumers to avoid pure powdered caffeine this summer after the death of an Ohio teen. Some major retailers have stopped selling it in bulk, but the substance is still widely available on the Internet and in some stores.

More than 7,500 people have now died from the Ebola virus, as the number of cases climbs towards 20,000, the World Health Organization said Monday.

The UN health agency reported that as of December 20, 19,340 people had been infected with the deadly virus in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and that 7,518 of them had died.

Owning exotic reptiles such as snakes, chameleons, iguanas and geckos could place infants at risk of salmonella infection, according to a British study published on Monday.

Researchers in the southwestern English county of Cornwall found that out of 175 cases of salmonella in children under five over a three-year period, 27 percent occurred in homes which had reptile pets.

An unlicensed Cambodian doctor was charged on Monday over an apparent mass HIV infection in a remote village after admitting he reused needles when treating patients, officials said.

Hundreds of panicked residents of Roka village in the western province of Battambang have flocked for testing since news of the infections emerged two weeks ago, with more than 100 people believed to have been infected.

The lines snaking into Bangladesh's overwhelmed hospitals are often so long, says Nusrat Hussein Kiwan, that they extend into the street outside -- too many patients seeking too few quality doctors.

So, through a Google search, the wife of a Bangladeshi construction executive chose a Malaysian hospital for her heart bypass surgery.