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.

The World Health Organization has warned that Ebola could spread beyond hard-hit Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to neighboring nations, but insisted that travel bans were not the answer.

"We want other countries in west Africa to be ready," WHO Ebola specialist Pierre Formenty said on Friday.

Spanish police busted a Chinese gang accused of carrying out back-street abortions, surgery and dentistry in unhygienic home clinics, officials said Friday.

They released photographs of items seized in the raids, including a pile of human teeth, pills and numerous unsterilized forceps and dental tools.

Federal health regulators have approved a first-of-a-kind set of robotic leg braces that can help some disabled people walk again.

The ReWalk system functions like an exoskeleton for people paralyzed from the waist down, allowing them to stand and walk with assistance from a caretaker.

Indonesia became the newest country to mandate graphic photo warnings on cigarette packs on Tuesday, joining more than 40 other nations or territories that have adopted similar regulations in recent years. The warnings, which showcase gruesome close-up images ranging from rotting teeth and cancerous lungs to open tracheotomy holes and corpses, are an effort to highlight the risks of health problems related to smoking. Research suggests these images have prompted people to quit, but the World Health Organization estimates nearly 6 million people continue to die globally each year from smoking-related causes. The tobacco industry has fought government efforts to introduce or increase the size of graphic warnings in some countries. Here are a few places where pictorial health warnings have made headlines:

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In a hospital in the Guinean capital Conakry, a doctor can barely conceal his anger over the Ebola crisis sweeping the country and the officials who once made hopeful pronouncements about the end of the outbreak.

"They lied, so our partners, and even the local population, put down their guard. And this is the result -- the epidemic has spread throughout the country," says Dr Alphadio from the Donka hospital.

The World Health Organization on Thursday called for "drastic action" to fight the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record, as it announced an 11-nation meeting to address the growing crisis.

As of Sunday, 635 cases of hemorrhagic fever (most confirmed to be Ebola), including 399 deaths, have been reported across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, making the outbreak the largest ever "in terms of the number of cases and deaths as well as geographical spread," WHO said.

People who watch three or more hours of television daily may be twice as likely to die prematurely than people who watch less, according to a study on Wednesday.

The research in the Journal of the American Heart Association is the latest to describe the potential dangers of a sedentary lifestyle, which include high blood pressure, obesity, cancer and heart disease.