Europe's medicines watchdog said Friday the benefits of acne drug Diane-35, also widely used as a contraceptive, outweigh the risk of developing blood clots in the veins -- when correctly prescribed.
The clot risk was "low", said a European Medicines Agency (EMA) ruling on a French-initiated review of the drug's safety.
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A new case of the deadly coronavirus has been detected in Saudi Arabia where 15 people have already died after contracting it, the health ministry announced on Saturday on its Internet website.
"One new case of novel coronavirus recorded in the Eastern Region" where most of the kingdom's cases have been registered, said the ministry, which this week created a special web page dedicated to the outbreak.
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A Nigerian court on Friday sentenced two officials from a pharmaceutical company to seven years in prison over the sale of an adulterated teething drug which killed 84 babies in 2008.
Children between two months and seven years-old, died from renal failure after taking the painkiller which was found to contain high levels of diethylene glycol, a poisonous solvent mostly used in brake fluid and as an engine coolant.
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Big names in medicine are set to give an upbeat assessment of the war on AIDS on Tuesday, 30 years after French researchers identified the virus that causes the disease.
Scientists will pay tribute to the astonishing success of AIDS drugs and highlight steps being taken towards a cure -- a goal once deemed all but out of reach.
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The World Health Organization says a yellow fever booster vaccination given 10 years after the initial shot isn't necessary.
The U.N.'s global health agency said Friday that its expert group on immunization believes a single dose of vaccination is sufficient to confer lifelong immunity against the disease.
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China is phasing out its reliance on executed prisoners for donated organs, but cultural attitudes are impeding the rise of donations among the general population.
Almost all donated organs in China used to come from executed prisoners. A growing proportion now come from ordinary people, and the government is seeking to eliminate prisoner donations.
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As many as one-fifth of American children and teens suffer from a mental disorder such as anxiety or depression and the incidence of such ailments is rising, a study released Thursday said.
"A total of 13 percent to 20 percent of children living in the United States experience a mental disorder in a given year," according to the report examining the mental health of adolescents released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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Peru's president signed a new law Thursday designed to reduce child obesity by encouraging healthier eating habits in schools.
The law regulates advertising for fatty foods and fizzy soft drinks in schools, the first step in a plan to ban some junk food altogether.
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There is no government strategy to fight the spread of AIDS in Russia, where the number of deaths caused by the disease continues to grow, a senior healthcare official said on Thursday.
"We have no national strategy to fight against AIDS," the director of the Russian Federal Agency against AIDS, Vadim Pokrovsky, told a news conference.
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U.S. researchers reported a breakthrough in stem cell research on Wednesday, describing how they have turned human skin cells into embyronic stem cells for the first time.
The method described by Oregon State University scientists in the journal Cell, would not likely be able to create human clones, said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, senior scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center.
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