An outbreak of plague even more vicious than the bubonic strain dubbed the black death has killed 39 people in Madagascar, the government said Thursday.

A government doctor said 90 percent of the cases were pneumonic plague, a strain much more vicious than the common bubonic plague that can kill within three days, leaving little time for antibiotics to work.

A person gets vaccinated against the flu at the Institut Pasteur de Lille research center on October 11, 2013 in Lille, northern France

The flu vaccine prevents the virus more than half the time in children and can also ward off more serious sickness, said the findings of a major clinical trial Wednesday.

One in three children worldwide cannot have their existence legally verified with a birth certificate since their birth was not registered, UNICEF warned Wednesday.

Almost 230 million youngsters under the age of five have no birth certificate, which puts them at a disadvantage for procedural matters and leaves them more vulnerable to abuse.

Having previously lost two babies to diarrhoea and dysentery, 25-year-old Suman Chandel lies on a bed in a clinic in remote northern India and smiles with relief.

Hours earlier, Chandel gave birth to her fourth child, a seemingly healthy baby boy weighing three kilograms, and is optimistic that this time the chances of survival are good.

New sign-up numbers are showing progress for President Barack Obama's health care law, but not enough to guarantee that Americans who need coverage by New Year's will be able to get it. That means more trouble for the White House after months of repairing a dysfunctional enrollment website.

Next year could start with a new round of political recriminations over the president's signature domestic achievement: bringing the United States as close as it's ever come to universal health care under the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare to its opponents.

Denmark's Financial Supervisory Authority said on Tuesday it had reported insulin world leader Novo Nordisk to the police for having hidden crucial information from its shareholders for two days.

In February, the Danish pharmaceutical company learnt on a Friday evening that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had rejected its applications for two new diabetes treatments, but did not share the information until late on Sunday.

A Chinese scientist working on the H7N9 virus at a disease control laboratory in Changsha, Hunan province, on April 7, 2013

A mutant form of the H7N9 flu virus that is resistant to frontline drugs is just as contagious as its non-resistant counterpart, according to a lab test reported on Tuesday.

Cases of chikungunya have occurred on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, marking the first time the mosquito-borne disease has spread in the western hemisphere, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday.

"As of 10 December 2013, altogether two confirmed, four probable and 20 suspected cases of chikungunya infection have been reported," the WHO said in a statement.

A French study has found heavy imbalances in the number of newborn girls and boys in the Caucasus and west Balkans, indicating parts of the region are rife with selective abortions.

Often associated with China and India, sex-selective abortions have been growing in these regions since the early 1990s, according to the study from the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED).

The Gulf state of Qatar on Tuesday launched a genetic code mapping project for its small population to help in treating diseases.

The "Qatar Genome" project is a "road map for future treatment," said Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the wife of the former emir, at the opening of the World Innovation Summit for Health in Doha.