An international team of surgeons has successfully given a South Korean-Canadian toddler a life-saving windpipe transplant made from plastic fibers and some of her own stem cells.

Hannah Warren, 2, was born without a trachea and is now the youngest person to ever receive a bio-engineered organ, after an operation in the United States.

A U.S. doctor has created a website to make it easier for the world's sickest people to connect with research that could potentially save their lives.

The non-profit endeavor known as MyClinicalTrialLocator.com aims to become "the Wikipedia of clinical trials," by allowing a quick and free search for studies at academic centers around the globe, said its founder Bruce Moskowitz.

Children's allergies are on the rise in the United States and are particularly common among the wealthiest in society, said a U.S. government report on Thursday.

Skin allergies such as eczema have risen the most over the past decade, going from a prevalence of 7.4 percent in 1997-1999 to 12.5 percent in 2009-2011, said the report by the National Center for Health Statistics on children up to age 17.

A new law has taken effect prohibiting Chinese from being committed to mental hospitals without their consent in an attempt to prevent "forced detentions", state-run media said Thursday.

China's first mental health law comes after right groups accused authorities of locking up hundreds of thousands of people in psychiatric hospitals each year, often as a form of punishment for dissidents.

Scientists said Wednesday they had found a brain region that controls physical ageing, and could target it to manipulate the lifespan of lab mice.

The findings may be a step towards finding the holy grail of slowing human ageing, but have yet to be tested in human subjects.

Ireland's government has published a long-awaited bill explaining the law on when life-saving abortions can be performed in a country that officially bans the practice.

The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill is dividing the government of Prime Minister Enda Kenny. Some Catholic conservatives within Kenny's party have vowed to reject the bill because it authorizes hospitals to perform abortions on suicidal women, so long as three doctors certify the suicide threat as credible.

The U.S. government on Tuesday lowered to 15 the age at which girls can buy the morning-after pill without a prescription and said the emergency contraception no longer has to be kept behind pharmacy counters.

The decision by the Food and Drug Administration is an attempt to find middle ground just days before a court-imposed deadline to lift all age restrictions on the drug.

The antiretroviral drug efavirenz is more effective at treating children infected with HIV than the more commonly used and cheaper nevirapine, according to a study out Tuesday.

The study is being billed as the first large-scale comparison of first-line treatments for HIV-positive children, and could have an impact on care in poor parts of the world, where most of them live.

Breast implants may delay cancer diagnosis in women, said a study Wednesday that urged a thorough probe into the potential health risks of this type of cosmetic surgery.

In a review of 12 earlier studies of breast cancer patients, a team of epidemiologists from Canada found that women with implants had a 26 percent higher risk of being diagnosed at a later stage of the disease.

Cancer research tends to involve small studies focused on a single therapy, often falling short of scientific standards seen in other medical investigations, said a study released Monday.

The trend may be driven by a desire to speed treatments to market, but raises questions about how well experimental cancer-fighting therapies will work in practice, said the findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association.