An experimental ebola vaccine has triggered promising immune responses from 20 healthy volunteers taking part in a preliminary trial.

The first nurse diagnosed with Ebola after treating an infected man at a Dallas hospital is free of the virus.

Barack Obama has conceded it "may be appropriate" to choose an Ebola "tsar" to lead the US response against the disease.

Scientists in the US found a nearly century-old container of ricin and other forgotten samples of dangerous pathogens as they combed laboratories for hazardous materials.

While the desire to develop drugs and vaccines are appealing and may help save lives, strengthening health systems in developing countries to make better use of existing tools is as important in combating diseases like ebola, writes Celine Gounder.

UCC’s Centre for Research in Vascular Biology has developed a device that promotes the bypass of arterial obstructions, potentially removing the need for major surgery.

Much of the vast machinery of the US government has ground to a halt as Democrats and Republicans blamed each other for a partial shutdown that closed federal agencies, national parks and research facilities across the nation.

President Cristina Fernandez has thyroid cancer, but test results show that it remains limited to a lobe in the right side of her neck, and has not metastasised or spread into her lymph nodes, her spokesman said.

THE US government asked scientists not to reveal all the details of how to make a version of the deadly bird flu that they created in labs in the US and Europe.

A US presidential commission will release key findings on a research project that deliberately infected Guatemalan inmates and mental patients with syphilis in the 1940s.

The US government may resume funding of embryonic stem cell research for now, an appeals court said, but the short-term approval may be of little help to research scientists caught in a legal battle that has just begun.

Actor Michael Douglas said today he had begun treatment for throat cancer and that his odds of recovery were high.

NEW techniques being developed at the University of Limerick are helping surgeons deal with complicated procedures such as brain aneurysms.

AMERICAN healthcare’s €28 billion man was top of Enterprise Minister Micheál Martin’s hit-list yesterday as his trade visit to drum up business continued.

The family of a pregnant woman who died while taking experimental Aids drugs to protect her baby against the disease is suing the doctors, drug-makers and hospitals involved in the study for $10m (€7.3m).

An Irish research team involved in a major international project studying autism will get €5m from the Government, it emerged today.

The bitter irony of Superman living a life confined to a wheelchair was not lost on Christopher Reeve.

The US government is ending the last major study of oestrogen, saying taking oestrogen alone is not as bad as taking it together with the hormone progestin, but it is still too risky for long-term use.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates announced a $200m (€184m) grant today to help identify and solve the “grand challenges in global health” that the private sector has little financial incentive to tackle.

GlaxoSmithKline PLC's experimental genital herpes vaccine will begin new clinical trials on female subjects, GSK and the National Institutes of Health said.

UP to 65,000 Irish women on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) are putting their health at risk, medical experts warned yesterday.