The head physician at a Turkish hospital says his team has performed the world's first quadruple limb transplant, attaching two arms and two legs to a young man.

Murat Tuncer on Saturday appealed for blood donations to overcome possible complications following the 20-hour operation, performed by more than 50 doctors at Hacettepe University Hospital in Ankara.

India marked a major success in its battle against polio Saturday by being removed from the World Health Organization's list of countries plagued by the crippling disease.

Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said the WHO removed India from the list after the country passed one year without registering any new cases.

A 12-year-old boy on the Indonesian resort island of Bali has died from bird flu, the fourth human death from the virus this year, an official said Saturday.

The boy developed fever on February 11 and was admitted to hospital five days later, the Indonesian health ministry's head of animal-borne infectious disease control, Rita Kusriastuti, told AFP.

Bird flu is believed to be a rare disease that kills more than half of the people it infects, but a U.S. study out Thursday suggests it may be more common and less lethal than previously thought.

The research could help soothe concerns about the potential for a deadly pandemic that may kill many millions of people, sparked by the recent lab creation of a mutant bird flu that can pass between mammals.

Women who regularly eat citrus fruits such as oranges and grapefruit may have a lower risk of blood-clot related stroke, according to a U.S. study published on Thursday.

Researchers looked at 14 years of data from a U.S. nurses survey that included 69,622 women who reported what they ate, including details on fruit and vegetable consumption, every four years.

More Americans died in 2007 of hepatitis C infection, which causes incurable liver disease, than from the virus that causes AIDS, U.S. health authorities said this week.

More than 15,000 people died of hepatitis C infection in 2007, compared to 12,734 who died from HIV-related causes, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Scientists on Wednesday said they had uncovered the first molecular proof that the "biological clock" is linked to a type of sudden, fatal heart attack.

Ventricular arrhythmia, or abnormal heartbeat, occurs most frequently after waking in the morning -- and also to a lesser degree in the evening hours -- and causes a high number of deaths.

An advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday urged approval of a new obesity drug, Qnexa, after warning against its approval in 2010 due to safety concerns.

The panel voted 20-2 that the FDA should allow Qnexa on the market, saying the latest overall benefit-risk assessment supported its approval.

A new drug to treat advanced skin cancer, or metastatic melanoma, has been shown to nearly double average survival time in a study of more than 130 patients, researchers said Wednesday.

Made by Genentech, a U.S. subsidiary of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, the drug, Zelboraf, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in August 2011, making it the first new treatment for melanoma in 13 years.

An outbreak of Lassa fever has killed 40 people and infected dozens of others in a third of Nigeria's 36 states over the past six weeks, a senior health official said Wednesday.

"We have 40 deaths, including two doctors and six nurses, from lassa fever which broke out in 12 states in the past six weeks," health ministry's chief epidemiologist Henry Akpan told Agence France Presse.