World Bank President Jim Yong Kim warned Tuesday that the world remains "dangerously unprepared" for deadly pandemics like the Ebola outbreak that has killed thousands in West Africa.

"The Ebola outbreak has been devastating in terms of lives lost and the loss of economic growth in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone," Kim said in a speech at Georgetown University in Washington.

Have doctors, therapy and pills had their day in helping to wean people off addiction? 

Shopping vouchers and online social networks may be powerful, modern tools to help people quit smoking and lose weight, two unusual experiments suggested Wednesday.

Girls who consume lots of sugary drinks start menstruating at a younger age, a study said Wednesday.

The findings are important because early onset of menstruation is linked to a higher risk of breast cancer in later life, the paper said, although other experts saw flaws in the probe.

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates says the world must use the lessons from battling Ebola to prepare for any future "war" against a global killer disease, with the help of new technology.

Gates, in Berlin for a donor conference of the GAVI alliance bringing vaccines to poor countries, said the risk of a worldwide pandemic meant it was reckless not to act now.  

President Barack Obama will request a doubling of funds for fighting and preventing antibiotic-resistant bacteria in his 2016 budget, the White House said Tuesday.

The budget blueprint to be unveiled in February will request $1.2 billion, twice the amount granted by Congress in 2015.

Liberia's president on Monday announced the closure of an Ebola treatment facility which lay at the epicentre of the virus's worst outbreak in history, as the disease's spread has slowed in the country.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf warned Liberians that while they could not yet afford to relax, the country had made significant progress in the fight against Ebola, and thanked states who helped Monrovia combat the virus.

The first human case of H7N9 bird flue in North America has been confirmed in a Canadian woman who recently returned from a trip to China, health officials said Monday.

The patient in her 50s began feeling sick two days after returning home in Canada's westernmost British Columbia province and sought care from a doctor. 

Senegal reopened its land border with Guinea on Monday, pointing to the "significant efforts" of its neighbor in fighting an Ebola outbreak that has claimed thousands of lives.

People and goods can now "move freely by land between the two countries," the interior ministry said in a statement cited by the state-run Senegalese Press Agency.

With virtually no hard proof that medical marijuana benefits sick children, and evidence that it may harm developing brains, the drug should only be used for severely ill kids who have no other treatment option, the nation's most influential pediatricians group says in a new policy.

Some parents insist that medical marijuana has cured their kids' troublesome seizures or led to other improvements, but the American Academy of Pediatrics' new policy says rigorous research is needed to verify those claims.

A British nurse who contracted Ebola while working as a volunteer in Sierra Leone said she was "happy to be alive" as she was discharged from hospital on Saturday having made a full recovery.

Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey was diagnosed in Glasgow on December 29 before being transferred to Britain's only isolation ward for Ebola patients at London's Royal Free Hospital.