Despite economic crises and dwindling aid, the U.N. said Monday huge progress had been made towards meeting the so-called Millennium Development Goals, including its bid to slash world hunger in half between 1990 and 2015.

"Given reinvigorated efforts, the target of halving the percentage of people suffering from hunger by 2015 appears within reach," said a U.N. progress report on its eight Millennium goals.

Two genes that are resistant to fungal wheat disease may help ward off a growing epidemic of stem rust that threatens crops in Africa, the Middle East and beyond, researchers said Friday.

International scientists have spent years trying to pin down the sections of the wheat genome that are resistant to Ug99, a pathogen that was first found to be killing wheat crops in Uganda in the late 1990s and has since appeared in Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen and Iran.

Britain took a step closer on Friday to becoming the first country to allow radical treatment that uses DNA from three parents to create an embryo.

The government backed an IVF-based technique designed to avoid serious mitochondrial diseases inherited on the maternal side, such as muscular dystrophy and cardiac problems.

Malawi is distributing free AIDS drugs to half a million people after years of nationwide HIV tests by the poor southern African nation, President Joyce Banda said Friday.

"Half of the population has so far been tested for HIV and half a million people are now on free drugs," Banda was quoted by state television as telling the first meeting of the UNAIDS and Lancet Commission in the administrative capital Lilongwe.

A U.S. girl whose public appeal for an adult lung donation thrust her into the media spotlight nearly died after her body rejected the organs and she has since had a rare second transplant, her mother said Friday.

Sarah Murnaghan, 10, suffers from cystic fibrosis and was said to have very little time left when her parents sued to change the rules and let her be on the list for adult lung donations, usually restricted to those 12 and over.

Virologists are casting a worried eye on this year's Islamic hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia as they struggle with the enigmatic, deadly virus known as MERS which is striking hardest in the kingdom.

Little is known about the new pathogen, beyond the fact that it can be lethal by causing respiratory problems, pneumonia and kidney failure. It can be transmitted between humans, but unlike its cousin, the SARS virus, which sparked a scare a decade ago, it does not seem very contagious.

The mood-stabilizing drug lithium reduces suicide risk by more than 60 percent among people with depression, a study said Thursday.

Lithium has long been prescribed to treat uni-polar disorder (also called clinical depression) and bipolar disorder (manic depression) -- but its use has been declining in many countries, according to Andrea Cipriani, who co-wrote the paper in the online journal bmj.com

Eating a portion of tuna, salmon, sardines or other oily fish once or twice a week reduces the risk of breast cancer, according to a review published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on Thursday.

Researchers based in China looked at 26 previously published studies covering more than 800,000 volunteers in the United States, Europe and Asia whose health was monitored and who gave details about their eating habits.

A gene scorecard may one day help predict which youngsters are likely to grow out of childhood asthma and which will have the disease in adulthood, a study said on Thursday.

Asthma is one of the commonest disorders among children in developed countries and is spreading fast in emerging economies.

The British government on Thursday said it would pursue a radical fertility technique that uses DNA from three parents to create an embryo.

The IVF-based technique is designed to avoid serious mitochondrial diseases inherited on the maternal side, such as muscular dystrophy.