Sierra Leone's health ministry said Thursday that deaths from a cholera outbreak had reached 220, affecting over 12,000 people in the West African nation, which is struggling to curb the disease.

"Some 12,140 people are affected nationwide in 10 of 12 districts," the health ministry's director of disease prevention and control, Amara Jambai, told journalists, saying the figure included cases recorded up to Wednesday.

U.S. health researchers said Thursday that they have documented lead poisoning risks among pregnant women who took Ayurvedic medicine and issued a new warning on the safety of traditional pills.

New York City health authorities probed six cases since last year of women -- all but one born in India -- found to be at high risk of lead poisoning due to Ayurvedic medicine, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Do older fathers doom their children to genetic disease? This is the question raised by a new study that says older men produce moregene mutations in the children they sire, boosting their risk of schizophrenia and autism and possibly other diseases.

Doctors are reporting a new benefit from weight-loss surgery — preventing diabetes. Far fewer obese people developed that disease if they had stomach-shrinking operations rather than usual care to try to slim down, a large study in Sweden found.

The results, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, are provoking fresh debate about when adjustable bands and other bariatric procedures should be offered.

The United States is experiencing the worst outbreak of West Nile virus since the mosquito-borne disease was first detected in 1999, health officials said Wednesday.

At least 41 people have died so far this summer and health officials have identified a total of 1,118 cases across the country.

For millions of the women around the world cooking the family meal is a daily, dangerous chore. Sweating over smoky open stoves, they put their lives and their children at risk every day.

More than three billion people, or 40 percent of the planet's population, still rely on open fires to cook, balancing a pot on top of some stones, under which burns a fire fueled by wood and coal, dung or left-over crops.

U.S. and South African lawyers are asking a court to allow thousands of miners with lung diseases to sue leading South African gold mining companies they accuse of negligence.

Lawyers say AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields and Harmony could face the largest damages suit in South African history if the court recognizes their case as a class action.

Paul Ryan works out and watches his diet, but a new study shows that clean living can only go so far to help people like the vice presidential candidate overcome a strong family history of heart disease.

The study of 4 million people — the largest ever on heart risks that run in families — found that having a close relative die young of cardiovascular disease doubles a person's odds of developing it by age 50. This risk was independent of other factors like high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes, and was even higher if more than one close family member had died young.

When she was 20 years old, Alphonsina Zara was pregnant with her first child. After three days of excruciating labor, though she was in a health center, her baby was stillborn.

Doctors found that she had developed a hole in her birth canal, a severe medical condition called obstetric fistula. She not only lost her baby, it disrupted her life for the next 14 years.

British American Tobacco (BAT) launched an advertising campaign in New Zealand Wednesday opposing plans to introduce plain packaging, in a move the government immediately dismissed as a waste of money.

New Zealand announced in-principle support for plain packaging in April and has enthusiastically welcomed world-first legislation in Australia forcing tobacco to be sold in drab, uniform packaging with graphic health warnings.