A mass vaccination program has been launched in Philippine communities that were devastated by Super Typhoon Haiyan to protect children against measles and polio, U.N. agencies said Wednesday.

The campaign began this week with 30,000 children being vaccinated in Tacloban city, one of the places hardest hit when Haiyan claimed thousands of lives nearly three weeks ago, the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF and World Health Organisation said.

People who start exercise even late in life can reap the benefit in good health, a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine said on Monday.

Researchers tracked the health of nearly 3,500 Britons whose average age was 64, for more than eight years.

Government grants to help poor children in South Africa also play an important role in reducing HIV risk from "sugar daddies" who prey on teenage girls, a study said on Tuesday.

In a wide-ranging probe published in The Lancet Global Health, researchers in Britain and South Africa interviewed 3,500 teenagers and followed this up with another interview a year later.

US authorities on Monday lifted restrictions on the prescription of diabetes drug Avandia after a new study indicated it did not carry an elevated risk of heart attacks.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the decision after considering the recommendations made by a 26-member panel of experts on June 6.

Research into medications to treat mental health disorders, which affect almost a quarter of the U.S. population, has slowed as major pharmaceutical companies cut back investment in this area, psychiatrists say.

"The companies seem to have concluded that developing new psychiatric drugs is too risky and too expensive," said Richard Friedman, professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.

Rodico Basilides visits a forlorn cross that stands as a memorial to his family who died in the catastrophic Philippine typhoon, one of countless survivors who are being forced to grieve without professional counselling.

"This is for my wife, Gladys, and four children. They were swept away by the waves," Basilides, 42, said as he stood alongside the cross made of two sticks tied together with green string on the floor of what used to be his seaside home.

Battling for jobs with millions of other new graduates, Chinese students are turning to plastic surgery for an advantage -- with one clinic offering noses inspired by the Eiffel Tower.

Chinese employers can be frank about their preference for attractive job candidates -- sometimes even posting height requirements in recruitment adverts.

Watching sport can make you fitter, according to research Sunday that said viewing other people exercise increases heart rate and other physiological measures as if you were working out yourself.

The study, published in the international journal Frontiers in Autonomic Neuroscience, showed that when watching a first person video of someone else running, heart rate, respiration, skin blood flow and sweat release all increased.

The Saudi health ministry on Sunday announced a new MERS death, raising to 55 the number of people killed by the coronavirus in the country with the most fatalities.

A 37-year-old Saudi man died in Riyadh, the ministry said on its website.

An expatriate living in Qatar has died of MERS, bringing to four the number of deaths in the Gulf state from the coronavirus, health authorities said on Friday.

The 48-year-old had other pre-existing health problems, Qatar's Supreme Council of Health in a statement.