More than 15,000 people in Japan have been left with skin blotches caused by a chemical contained in popular skin-whitening creams, the maker of the products said Tuesday.

Japanese cosmetics giant Kanebo said it had received 15,192 complaints from Japan from users of 54 products containing the whitening chemical "Rhododenol", in what has become an escalating public relations nightmare for the company.

Regular exercise boosts teenagers' school grades -- and particularly helps girls in science, a British study said Tuesday.

The more physically active they were, the better children performed in school, according to findings published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

A new experiment to regrow hair by cloning follicles and using discarded infant foreskins to graft them has shown some early success in lab mice, researchers said Monday.

The process generated new human hair in five of the seven animals on which it was tested, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Asia-Pacific countries face serious challenges from "lifestyle" diseases and ageing populations even as they overcome more traditional illnesses, the World Health Organization's regional director said Monday.

Western Pacific WHO director Shin Young-soo said such ailments, often arising from a change in diets and less exercise, were sharply rising in Asian nations.

Cholera has killed 50 people in northwest Nigeria in the past week, health officials said Monday, in the latest outbreak of the disease which has claimed thousands of lives across the country since 2010.

The latest infections struck Zamfara state where residents began drinking water directly from streams and untreated wells after a main water pipeline was forced to shut.

When Dominique Duhme dives into a river canal among the thousands of starters at the Noosa Triathlon, he'll achieve the first of two life-changing goals he set for himself when he decided to shed a significant amount of weight.

The second won't come until early next year when he's able to donate one of his two healthy kidneys to his wife, Karina, who been undergoing three five-hour dialysis sessions a week since an organ donated by her sister began to fail.

Family, not doctors, should decide when to cut off life support, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday in the case of a severely-brain damaged man.

In a 5-2 split decision, the justices said Hassan Rasouli's Toronto doctors must obtain consent from his wife to disconnect feeding and hydration tubes, or failing that apply for permission from a quasi-judicial board that addresses matters of consent in healthcare.

A U.S. appeals court heard arguments Friday in the case of three Guantanamo detainees who want to ban force-feeding for hunger strikers, a practice they say is "inhumane."

Their lawyer Jon Eisenberg argued that authorities at the controversial "war on terror" prison in Cuba were force-feeding the detainees "before their life is at risk."

In a desolate area of central Indonesia where lush rain forest once stood, illegal miners on the frontline of a modern-day gold rush tear up the earth in the hunt for the precious metal.

Thousands of men use high-pressure hoses to blast tonnes of sand out of the ground daily in open pits around Kereng Pangi on Borneo island, before running it through filters to find specks of gold.

Like a janitor sweeping the halls after the lights go out, major changes occur in the brain during sleep to flush out waste and ward off disease, researchers said Thursday.

The research in the journal Science offers new answers to explain why people spend a third of their lives asleep and may help in treating dementia and other neurological disorders.