Beijing  - Ministers from 27 nations have backed a 15-billion-dollar plan to provide universal access to diagnosis and treatment of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) by 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday.

The ministers agreed to remove barriers to TB care, guarantee supplies of medicines, and develop full management and training systems for treatment of MDR-TB and extremely drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), the WHO said in a statement.

Washington, April 3 : In what may eventually hold great significance for patients who have suffered myocardial damage as a result of a heart attack, a study has shown that cells in a human heart can develop into adulthood and their age is, on average, six years younger than the individual.

Scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Karolinska Institute, Universite Claude Bernard Lyon, Lund University, and Lund University Hospital made these findings by using the amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere from above-ground nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960.

Washington, Apr 3: Snoozing does more than help us recover from tensions and weariness - it helps the brain clear clutter accumulated after a long day''s work and make way for new learning.

Shutting down during the night helps the body to produce new synapses which connect brain cells.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis believe if synapses are not renewed they become saturated with knowledge which stops people absorbing new information.

Hong Kong - One form of fatal strokes is more likely to affect people in winter than the summer, a team of Hong Kong medical experts said Friday.

Neurologists found a far higher incidence of strokes caused by aneurismal subarachnoid haemorrhage, a rupture that leads to blood filling the space surrounding the brain, in winter when temperatures are lower and atmospheric pressure higher.

Washington, Apr 2 : In a breakthrough study, researchers have developed a new stem cell therapy that may help in treating hearing impairment.

Deafness typically involves the loss of sensory receptors, called hair cells, for their "tufts" of hair-like protrusions, and their associated neurons.

London, April 2 : Health experts are worried that middle-aged people are continuing to ignore sex disease risks.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain has revealed that about one-fifth of the 2,258 adults polled, aged 45 to 54, confessed to having had unprotected sex with someone other than a long-term partner in the past five years.

The society's said that people were found to have a misconception that their risk of catching a sexually transmitted infection (STI) was "next to nothing".