Inside a ramshackle and once-abandoned pharmacy in Donetsk in Ukraine's war zone, Doctor Andrei Volkov is thrilled. Medicine -- 150 bags of it -- has just arrived. 

But Volkov won't earn any money from it. He plans to give it away for free.

A U.S. study out Tuesday including more than 23,000 children has debunked the long-standing belief that living in the inner city raises the risk of asthma.

Instead, it found that being poor, African-American or Puerto Rican were more significant risk factors for asthma than urban living, said the findings by researchers at the John Hopkins University.

A lethal health crisis is brewing in Russian-annexed Crimea and war-torn eastern Ukraine, where injecting drug users have lost access to therapy to wean them off heroin, the U.N.'s AIDS envoy said Wednesday.

Out of 805 people in Crimea who before annexation were receiving opioid substitution therapy (OST) -- a tried and tested U.N.-backed treatment -- "between 80 and 100" have now died, Michel Kazatchkine told journalists.

Better techniques and policies have given children born from artificial fertilization a much better chance of survival and good health, a Scandinavian study said Wednesday.

Doctors looked at data from 1988 to 2007 from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden for more than 92,000 children born through assisted reproduction technology (ART), the term for in-vitro and other methods.

The deadly Ebola virus is changing, and new genetic mutations that have arisen in the past four decades could thwart the experimental drugs that some pharmaceutical companies are developing, researchers said Tuesday.

There is no drug on the market to treat Ebola, and no vaccine to prevent it, but clinical trials were accelerated last year after the worst outbreak in history began sweeping West Africa, killing more than eight thousand people so far and infecting more than 21,000.

Nigeria was on Tuesday awarded $8.1 million in funding for a final push to eradicate polio, as it nears six months without a case of the disease.

Rotary International, which is working with the World Health Organization (WHO) to wipe out the virus, said the money would go towards vaccination, research and surveillance programs.

Joining a walking group is one of the easiest ways to boost health and morale, according to an investigation published Monday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Researchers at Britain's University of East Anglia analysed 42 published studies of people who took up organised walking -- regular outings that typically lasted less than an hour.

A little-known side to the government's health insurance website is prompting renewed concerns about privacy, just as the White House is calling for stronger cybersecurity protections for consumers.

It works like this: When you apply for coverage on HealthCare.gov, dozens of data companies may be able to tell that you are on the site. Some can even glean details such as your age, income, ZIP code, whether you smoke or if you are pregnant.

A virulent group of TB germs spread from East Asia in waves propelled by industrialisation, World War I and Soviet collapse to yield some of the drug-resistant strains plaguing the world today, a study said Monday.

Researchers' massive trawl through nearly 5,000 TB samples from 99 countries pinpointed changes in the DNA code to draw a partial family tree of the germ Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Karunawathie isn't hungry for breakfast. She rarely is these days, but she forces herself to choke down a few bites of rice, dried fish and a simple coconut mix. The doctors say it's better to have something in her stomach before the four-hour dialysis treatments.

She's going for her second session of the week, dressed all in pink, right down to her flip-flops. Her fingers and toes are fat with fluid, and her spongy arms feel like soft water balloons. Since she can no longer pass liquids on her own, doctors have told her to drink only 500 milliliters a day — equal to less than a can and a half of soda.