Health officials in Somalia are rolling out a new five-in-one vaccine for children that they say will save thousands of lives.
Meanwhile, in Abu Dhabi Thursday, global health leaders unveiled a six-year plan to eradicate polio. Close to three-quarters of the plan's projected $5.5 billion cost has already been pledged.

China's state news agency says one person died and 20 others were sickened after a chef mistakenly added pesticide instead of a sauce as he was making lunch.
Xinhua News Agency said in a brief dispatch Thursday that the chef was among those who fell ill after eating the lunch at a construction site in northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The others who were sickened were migrant workers. Two people were in critical condition.

U.S. regulators announced a plan Wednesday to test a handheld device that can scan drugs and report within seconds whether they are real or fake, in a bid to help the fight against malaria.
Counterfeit and substandard malaria drugs are a key concern in many parts of the world where the mosquito-borne disease is a problem, and finding a low-cost way to test drugs in the field would be a boon to public health efforts, experts said.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Wednesday he has "a problem" with his justice minister, who sparked a row by accusing Germany of embryo traffic and experimentation.
"Regarding Minister (Jaroslaw) Gowin, I admit there's a problem," Tusk told reporters, saying he was annoyed by the remarks.

England aims to inject a million youngsters with measles vaccine following a surge in cases of the potentially fatal disease, public health authorities said Thursday.
The rise in cases appears to be due to a period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when fears over a discredited link between the MMR vaccine and autism were at their height, Public Health England (PHE) said.

Greek police said Wednesday it had dismantled a network that had smuggled assisted reproduction treatments from Turkey and illegally sold human eggs.
Eleven suspects, including two clinic managers and two pharmaceutical company owners, were detained, senior police official Theodoros Floratos told reporters.

International experts probing China's deadly H7N9 bird flu virus said Wednesday it was "one of the most lethal influenza viruses" seen so far and concluded that the likely source of infection was poultry.
China had confirmed 108 cases and 22 deaths since the first the infections were announced on March 31, with a higher proportion of cases in older people.

A group of independent experts has slammed Britain's cosmetic surgery industry for not protecting patients adequately and is calling for stricter controls in the aftermath of a breast implant scandal in Europe last year that left tens of thousands of women with cheap silicone implants prone to ruptures. A top British health official, meanwhile, signaled support for their recommendations.
In a review of how cosmetic procedures are regulated, the group said all skin fillers should be available by prescription only and that all practitioners — from surgeons to aestheticians who inject Botox — must be properly qualified. The expert group, commissioned by the U.K. Department of Health, also called for the creation of a registry of implants and other medical devices and an ombudsman for private health care, among other suggestions.

A lethal new strain of bird flu that emerged in China over the past month appears to jump more easily from birds to humans than the one that started killing people a decade ago, World Health Organization officials said Wednesday.
Scientists are watching the virus closely to see if it could spark a global pandemic but say there is little evidence so far to show the virus can spread easily from human to human.

Ghana is recalling a shipment of 120 million Chinese-made condoms distributed to charities in the country after testing showed that they were riddled with holes and prone to breaking, an official said Tuesday.
Twenty million of the condoms have already been given out and Ghana's Food and Drug Authority is trying to get them back, said the agency's head of enforcement, Thomas Amedzro.
