The Ministry of Public Health and the Lebanese Society of Rheumatology with the Association of Arthritis Patients in Lebanon ‘IRADA’, and the support of Hoffmann-La Roche launched Thursday the second National Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) Awareness Month in Lebanon at the Phoenicia Hotel, a press release said Friday.

The launch was under the patronage of the Minister of Public Health Ali Hassan Khalil represented by Dr. Asaad Khoury, and was attended by members of the Lebanese Society of Rheumatology and members the press.

Global and local health authorities are not doing enough to fight a cholera outbreak that continues to claim lives in Haiti, Doctors Without Borders said Thursday.

"We are worried about the lack of support from the international community and the lack of action from health authorities in Haiti," Thierry Goffeau, head of the group's Haiti operations, told Agence France Presse.

They live on your skin, up your nose, in your gut — enough bacteria, fungi and other microbes that collected together could weigh, amazingly, a few pounds.

Now scientists have mapped just which critters normally live in or on us and where, calculating that healthy people can share their bodies with more than 10,000 species of microbes.

An American man whose HIV seemed to disappear after a blood marrow transplant for leukemia may be showing new hints of the disease, sparking debate over whether a cure was really achieved.

Scientists disagree over the latest findings on Timothy Brown, also known as the "Berlin patient," presented at a conference in Spain last week, according to a report in the journal Science's ScienceInsider blog.

Surgeons said Thursday they had transplanted the first-ever vein grown in a lab from a patient's own stem cells into a 10-year-old girl, sparing her the trauma of harvesting veins from her body.

The groundbreaking procedure may offer hope for patients who don't have healthy veins for use in dialysis or heart bypass surgery, said a paper published in the Lancet medical journal.

An influential British bioethics group says that couples who face the risk of having a baby with certain genetic diseases should be allowed to use eggs from two women to produce the embryo.

Such controversial procedures should only be allowed if they are proven safe, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics said Tuesday, but its advice seems likely to reignite debate. Currently, such treatments are only allowed for research in the U.K., and British law forbids altering a human egg or embryo before transferring it into a woman.

Brazilian researchers say they have successfully tested a vaccine against schistosomiasis, a disease caused by parasitic worms that afflicts more than 200 million people worldwide.

"This is an unprecedented breakthrough in medicine that involved 30 years of scientific work," Dr Tania Araujo-Jorge, of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro, said Tuesday. The institute receives public and private funding.

Some stem cells can lay dormant for more than two weeks in a dead person and then be revived to divide into new, functioning cells, scientists in France said Tuesday.

The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, unlocks further knowledge about the versatility of these cells, touted as a future source to replenish damaged tissue.

Men who are doctors earn about $12,000 more per year than women doctors, according to a U.S. study published on Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The differences persisted even after adjusting for factors like specialty, academic rank and work hours, said researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Killing vampire bats in a bid to curtail the spread of rabies to humans and livestock may make the problem worse, scientists said Wednesday.

The practice of "vampiricide" in which a poisonous paste is applied to captured animals who spread it to others in mutual grooming back in the roost, does not reduce rabies prevalence, they contend.