A teenager from Texas who contracted a brain-eating disease after swimming in a lake about 110km north of Houston has died .

A 26-year-old Indian man who was cured of Ebola in Liberia has been placed in isolation at the New Delhi airport after traces of the virus were found in his semen, India’s Health Ministry says.

A woman who arrived in New Jersey on a flight from west Africa has tested negative for Ebola in a preliminary test.

Alarmed governors of New Jersey and New York have ordered a mandatory, 21-day quarantine of all medical workers and other arriving airline passengers who have had contact with victims of the deadly Ebola disease in west Africa.

The World Health Organisation has warned that a toddler who brought Ebola to Mali was bleeding from her nose during her journey on public transport and may have infected many people.

President Barack Obama appointed an ebola tsar for the US, and the government said a Texas health worker who may have had contact with specimens from an ebola patient was isolated on a cruise ship.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are donating $25million (€19.73m) to the CDC Foundation to help address the Ebola epidemic.

Ebola still has the “upper hand” in the outbreak that has killed more than 1,400 people in West Africa, but experts have the means to stop it, an American expert has said.

GlaxoSmithKline Plc has won US regulatory approval for a daily pill against the deadly HIV infection that was developed by ViiV Healthcare Ltd, its joint venture with two other drugmakers.

INDIAN doctors have reported the country’s first cases of “totally drug-resistant tuberculosis,” a long-feared and virtually untreatable form of the killer lung disease.

The drought and famine in Somalia have killed more than 29,000 children under the age of five, according to US estimates, the first time such a precise death toll has been released related to the Horn of Africa crisis.

EVIDENCE “strongly suggests” that a United Nations peacekeeping mission brought a cholera strain to Haiti that has killed thousands of people, a study by a team of epidemiologists and physicians says.

The United Nations secretary-general plans to call for an independent commission to study whether UN peacekeepers caused a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 2,400 people in Haiti, an official said today.

Protesters who hold UN soldiers from Nepal responsible for a deadly outbreak of cholera which has killed nearly 1,000 people have barricaded Haiti’s second-largest city, burned cars and stoned a peacekeeping base.

Health chiefs are examining at least 120 suspected cases of cholera in Haiti's capital, the most significant warning sign yet that the epidemic has spread from outlying areas to threaten as many as three million people.

United Nations investigators took samples of foul-smelling waste trickling behind a Nepalese peacekeeping base in Haiti amid claims that sewage from the newly arrived unit caused the cholera epidemic that has made more than 4,000 people ill.

Doctors are struggling to save children stricken by lead poisoning – many of them blind, deaf and unable to walk – after poor herdsmen in northern Nigeria began illegally mining gold in an area with high concentrations.

SWINE FLU fears hit the Wimbledon tennis championships yesterday as World Health Organisation (WHO) figures showed global cases leaping past 70,000 while Australian researchers said a vaccine could be ready in months.

WITH swine flu still spreading, the UN health agency is warning countries to confine the use of antiviral drugs to high-risk patients to ensure adequate supplies in case the virus should mutate and become more dangerous.

With swine flu still spreading, the UN health agency is urging countries to limit their use of antiviral drugs to only high-risk patients to ensure adequate supplies in case the virus mutates and becomes more dangerous.

Costa Rica’s health minister today confirmed the death of a 53-year-old patient with swine flu, the first death from the epidemic outside a North American nation.

Japanese authorities were scrambling today to track travellers who arrived on the same flight as three people diagnosed with the country's first confirmed cases of swine flu.

Mexico said a swine flu epidemic appears to be easing, but today urged citizens not to let their guard down against a virus that has killed 19 people and is spreading across Asia and Europe.

Mexico reported no new deaths from swine flu overnight, giving health experts more reason to be optimistic that the worst is over at the epicentre of the outbreak, despite new cases being confirmed across Europe and Asia.

Most of the largest US airlines will temporarily reduce services to Mexico, as swine flu fears keep many US travellers from venturing south of the border.

INTERNET giant Google has launched an early-warning system for flu outbreaks in the US.

Internet giant Google has launched an early-warning system for influenza outbreaks in the United States, it confirmed today.

The world is unprepared for a flu pandemic, health officials said at a conference in Malaysia, citing a lack of political commitment, funding and a vaccine to protect humans against bird flu.

EIGHTEEN pork plant workers in Minnesota, at least five in Indiana and one in Nebraska have come down with a mysterious neurological condition they appear to have contracted while removing brains from slaughtered pigs, US researchers and health officials said.

A globetrotting Atlanta lawyer with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was allowed back into the US by a border inspector who disregarded a computer warning to stop him and don protective gear, officials said.

A MAN with a form of tuberculosis so dangerous he is under the first US government-ordered quarantine since 1963 said he took one transatlantic flight for his wedding and honeymoon and another because he feared for his life.

The world’s largest cruise ship was kept in port for intensive cleaning after a second outbreak of gastrointestinal illness in two voyages made 108 people ill.

TUBERCULOSIS in a new, more deadly form poses the disease’s greatest threat to Europe since World War II, world health officials said yesterday.

It is time for the African-American community “to face the fact that Aids has become a black disease” and find ways to defeat it, said the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People at the international Aids summit in Toronto, Canada, yesterday.

A WORLD Health Organisation investigation has found that the deadly bird flu virus has mutated slightly in an Indonesian family cluster on Sumatra island.

Members of an Indonesian family who died of bird flu probably passed the disease among themselves, but world health officials said there was no evidence the virus had mutated and decided against raising the pandemic alert level.

The UN health agency is investigating possible human-to-human transmission of bird flu among members of an Indonesian family, but said today there is no evidence that the virus has mutated or spread beyond the family.

The death toll from an outbreak of the rare Marburg virus in Angola has climbed to 244, authorities said.

Health and animal experts warned bird flu could trigger the next global pandemic as they opened a three-day conference today in Vietnam on how to control what has been deemed the world’s biggest health risk.

A teenager who is claimed to be the first person known to have survived rabies without a vaccination went home today after nearly 11 weeks in the hospital, officials in the United States said.

The bird flu strain that killed 24 people in east Asia earlier this year and resurfaced in recent weeks has become endemic to the region, and the virus could trigger a global health crisis if it goes unchecked, a new study says.

A fifth person has died from bird flu in Thailand, the health minister said in Bangkok today.

Asia’s human death toll from bird flu rose to 14 today after it was announced that a teenage girl had died from the disease in Vietnam.

A BIRD FLU outbreak that has sickened nearly 600,000 chickens in Vietnam is suspected of being linked to the deaths of 10 children and an adult in Hanoi, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday.