The wrong approach to wiping out the mosquitoes that cause dengue infections could lead to worse epidemics in the future, according to a study released Tuesday.

Targeting only mosquito larvae, and not adults, with insecticides may work in the short run, but could result in higher resistance in the insects and less disease immunity among humans, especially in urban settings, the study found.

Male doctors are four times more likely to be disciplined for misconduct than female medics, according to a new Australian study which found the biggest cause of complaint was sexual misbehavior.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne analyzed 485 cases where doctors had been found guilty of misconduct and disciplined in Australia and New Zealand between 2000 and 2009.

An expert panel on Thursday unanimously voted in support of a second new hepatitis C drug, Vertex Pharmaceuticals' telaprevir, which studies suggest can boost cure rates of the liver disease.

The advisory panel, which makes recommendations to the Food and Drug Administration, on Wednesday lent its support to a similar drug, boceprevir, made by pharmaceutical giant Merck.

A simple checklist that parents fill out in the waiting room may help doctors someday screen for warning signs of autism as early as a baby's first birthday.

San Diego pediatricians tested the tool with more than 10,000 babies at their 1-year checkups, looking for such things as how the tots babble, gesture and interact with others.

With some genetic sleuthing, scientists have fingered a likely culprit in the spread of leprosy in the southern United States: the nine-banded armadillo.

DNA tests show a match in the leprosy strain between some patients and these prehistoric-looking critters — a connection scientists had suspected but until now couldn't pin down.

Heart attacks that occur in the morning are likely to be more serious than attacks at other times of the day, a specialist journal reported on Wednesday.

Spanish researchers looked at data from 811 patients who had been admitted to a Madrid clinic with a myocardial infarction between 2003 and 2009.

Aspirin and other anti-inflammatory drugs taken for pain relief may reduce the effectiveness of anti-depressants such as Prozac, a U.S. study suggested on Monday.

As many as one in five people are affected by major depressive disorders but about one-third of them are resistant to anti-depressant drugs, said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Europe, especially France, has been hit by a major outbreak of measles, which the U.N. health agency is blaming on the failure to vaccinate all children.

The World Health Organization said Thursday that France had 4,937 reported cases of measles between January and March — compared with 5,090 cases during all of 2010. In all, more than 6,500 cases have been reported in 33 European nations.

High levels of pesticide exposure in pregnant women have been linked to lower IQs in their children, according to three separate U.S studies released on Thursday.

Two studies were done in New York City and a third was in Salinas, a farming area of northern California. All spanned nearly a decade, tracking levels of pesticide in expectant mothers and testing nearly 1,000 children up to age nine.

Kidney failure is a main complication of diabetes, but a lab study on mice showed that a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet could reverse that in eight weeks, U.S. researchers said Wednesday.

The extreme food plan is known as a ketogenic diet and is often used to treat children with drug-resistant epilepsy. It starves the body of carbs and sugars, thereby tricking the body into burning fat for fuel instead of glucose.