By the time 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan finally got a lung transplant last week, she'd been waiting for months, and her parents had sued to give her a better shot at surgery.

Her cystic fibrosis was threatening her life, and her case spurred a debate on how to allocate donor organs. Lungs and other organs for transplant are scarce.

An Australian woman who now speaks with a French-sounding accent after a head injury eight years ago has revealed the experience has left her feeling frustrated and reclusive.

Leanne Rowe, born and raised on the southern Australian island of Tasmania, was in a serious car crash which left her with a broken back and jaw.

China's newly announced measures to combat pollution by slashing emissions from major polluting industries and holding local officials responsible could take 18 years to bring air quality within acceptable standards, analysts said Monday.

The problem of air pollution has stoked popular discontent across the country, with levels of particulate matter in Beijing measured at 40 times above World Health Organization limits this year.

The 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl who fought for a lung transplant has a difficult journey ahead. The transplant isn't a cure for her cystic fibrosis, and new lungs don't tend to last as long as other transplanted organs.

But it can extend life by years, buying some time.

Men and their preference for younger female mates may have led to the phenomenon of menopause in women, according to a controversial study by Canadian researchers published this week.

"If women were reproducing all along, and there were no preference against older women, women would be reproducing like men are for their whole lives," said evolutionary geneticist Rama Singh, a professor at McMaster University.

Four suspected cases of the human variant of mad cow disease, one of them fatal, have emerged in western Canada, local media reported Friday.

The degenerative brain disease Creutzfeldt-Jakob is so rare that it is odd for four suspected cases to crop up at once, CBC News quoted British Columbia Provincial Health Officer Perry Kendall as saying.

A review into the care of a pregnant Indian dentist who died after being denied an abortion in Ireland identified a number of failings when its conclusions were published on Thursday.

The death of 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar in October ignited calls for new legislation governing abortion in predominantly Catholic Ireland.

U.S. authorities on Thursday warned makers of medical devices and hospital networks to step up efforts to guard against potential cyber attacks.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said implanted devices, which could include pacemakers or defibrillators, could be connected to networks that are vulnerable to hackers.

A Mozambique medical strike now in its third week has paralysed all but essential services at some of the country's busiest hospitals, which are being forced to turn away desperate patients.

"Every day I come and there are no doctors," says gynaecology patient, Virginia Sitoe, who has been waiting since May 24 for test results to schedule a much-needed operation.

The government of Canada's mostly French-speaking Quebec province on Wednesday unveiled legislation allowing terminally ill patients to kill themselves with a doctor's help.

The bill, expected to be passed into law as early as September, would make Quebec the first province in Canada to effectively legalize assisted suicide and set the stage for a jurisdictional row with Ottawa.