A manual pelvic examination in which gynecologists use their hands to feel around for potentially cancerous masses is not needed for most women, a leading doctors' group said Monday.

The American College of Physicians said women should still see their doctors annually for regular Pap smears and cervical exams to screen for cancer and sexually transmitted infections.

Some childhood vaccines are linked to serious side effects, but they are quite rare and do not include autism, food allergies or cancer, said a review of scientific literature Tuesday.

A host of vaccines commonly given to children under age six were the focus of the systematic review of rigorously conducted studies, published in the peer-reviewed U.S. journal Pediatrics.

New York state can end its three-decade HIV crisis by the year 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday as he announced an ambitious plan to deliver a knockout blow to the epidemic by boosting testing, reducing new infections and expanding treatment.

The governor said the state is aiming to reduce new HIV diagnoses to 750 by the end of the decade — about the same number of tuberculosis cases seen in New York City each year — down from 3,000 expected this year and 14,000 new cases of the disease in 1993. If the state is successful, it would be the first time the number of people living with HIV has gone down since the crisis began with the first widely reported cases in 1981.

A long-term study of women who used ovary-stimulating hormones for fertility treatment found no widespread evidence of a higher cancer risk, researchers said on Monday.

The results appear to contradict a number of studies in recent years that suggested such treatments may increase the risk of the disease. 

In the past decade, billions of dollars have been spent trying to save the lives of mothers in developing countries using strategies — usually inexpensive drugs — deemed essential by the U.N. health agency.

Yet two large analyses of maternal health programs— including one conducted by the U.N. itself — report that the efforts appeared almost useless, raising troubling questions about why all that money was spent.

A new "supercooling" technique keeps rat livers alive three times longer than before, boosting hopes for easing shortages of human transplant organs, scientists said Sunday.

The method involves cooling the livers while flushing them with oxygen and nutrients and preserving them in a solution containing a form of antifreeze.

Thai health authorities on Friday said cigarette packets will carry warnings on the risks of smoking across 85 percent of their surface, in a blow to tobacco companies who had fiercely opposed the move.

The warnings -- featuring gruesome photographs of smoking-related ailments -- will increase from 55 to 85 percent of the surface of both sides of every cigarette packet, according to the kingdom's Ministry of Public Health.

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a long-delayed inhalable diabetes medication to help patients control their blood sugar levels during meals.

The FDA cleared MannKind Corp.'s Afrezza, a fast-acting form of insulin, for adults with the most common form of diabetes, which affects more than 25 million Americans. The approval decision comes more than three years after the agency first asked MannKind to run additional clinical studies on the drug.

Pigs are piled up on in the back of a truck before getting culled and buried on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt on May 14, 2009

Latvia ordered a cull of pigs and a 40-day ban on public events in its eastern district of Latgale on Friday amid an outbreak of African swine fever.

With the world's highest birth rate in a country where first-time mothers are often barely past puberty, having a baby in impoverished Niger can be tantamount to a death sentence.

The West African state and humanitarian groups have worked to slash both birth and maternal mortality rates, but despite strides results are not good enough, the UN warned this week.