The first person diagnosed with the deadly Ebola virus on U.S. soil is faring worse and now in critical condition, health officials said Saturday, having previously described him as seriously ill.

"Mr. Duncan is in critical condition," the Texas hospital treating Thomas Eric Duncan, who traveled from Liberia to Texas in late September, said in a brief statement.

A 36-year-old Swede has become the world's first woman to give birth after receiving a womb transplant, medical journal The Lancet said on Saturday, describing the event as a breakthrough for infertile women.

The healthy baby boy was born last month, it said. Both mother and infant are doing well.

A U.S. television network prepared Friday to evacuate a cameraman who contracted Ebola in Liberia, as the U.N.'s pointman flew to Sierra Leone, calling the epidemic the world's "highest priority".

Ashoka Mukpo, 33, who was working as a freelancer for NBC news, discovered he was running a fever on Wednesday, his network said, and is in quarantine in a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) treatment centre.

Applying moisturizer to a newborn baby's skin could help prevent eczema and even food allergies in later life, possibly offering a cheap and easy way to combat a growing global problem, a Japanese institute said Friday.

Health officials in Texas were monitoring 100 people Thursday for signs of Ebola and ordered four close family members to stay home as authorities investigate the first confirmed U.S. case of the deadly disease.

The patient, who was identified in U.S. media as Thomas Eric Duncan, traveled from Liberia to Texas, where he was diagnosed earlier this week.

A new genetic history of HIV shows how the pandemic almost certainly took root in the 1920s in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers said Thursday.

Ten thousand mosquitoes immunized against dengue fever have been released in Brazil as part of an innovative attempt to curb the spread of the tropical viral sickness, biologists said Thursday.

Gabriel Sylvestre Ribeiro told AFP that the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were released in Tubiacanga neighborhood in northern Rio state.

The latest commercial for Procter & Gamble's top-selling brand of sanitary pads in India ticks all the usual boxes -- a young woman jogs happily in pristine white trousers, before effortlessly winning a tennis tournament.

Four people who were infected with a virus causing severe respiratory illness across the country have died, but what role the virus played in the deaths is unclear, health officials said Wednesday.

A 10-year-old Rhode Island girl died last week after suffering both a bacterial infection and infection from enterovirus 68, Rhode Island health officials said. The virus is behind a spike in harsh respiratory illnesses in children since early August.

Five people are being infected with Ebola every hour in Sierra Leone and demand for treatment beds is far outstripping supply, the Save the Children charity warned on Thursday.

If the current "terrifying" rate of infection continues, 10 people every hour will be infected with the deadly virus in the West African country by the end of October, the London-based organisation warned.