When the time came to vaccinate her 4-year-old daughter, Yelena Hlushko hesitated, spooked by widespread fears in Ukraine about vaccines and by a boil her older child developed after an immunization shot. Eventually she decided to follow the government's recommendation - only to find her local health clinic was out of the vaccine.

For the activists who led the effort to legalize recreational marijuana in Washington state last fall, Jamen Shively was one of their biggest fears: an aspiring pot profiteer whose unabashed dreams of building a cannabis empire might attract unwanted attention from the federal government or a backlash that could slow the marijuana reform movement across the country.

Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced Monday that a physician with a long career in health policy and research will become the breast cancer charity's new president and CEO.

A Boston hospital is starting the world's first hand transplant program for children, and doctors say it won't be long until face transplants and other radical operations to improve appearance and quality of life are offered to kids, too.

Focus on the details, and the cases seem very different. One was killed by virulent white racists, the other by a part-Hispanic neighborhood watchman who insists he faced a vicious attack. One was weighted down and dumped in a river; in the other case, police were called by the shooter himself.

Ending a six-month legislative session, Arizona lawmakers endorsed a key element of President Barack Obama's health care law in a huge political victory for Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, after a lengthy fight over Medicaid expansion that divided the state's Republican leadership.

The 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl who fought for a lung transplant has a difficult journey ahead. The transplant isn't a cure for her cystic fibrosis, and new lungs don't tend to last as long as other transplanted organs.

A miscarrying woman who died in an Irish hospital should have had her blood poisoning detected much sooner and been offered an abortion to improve her odds of survival, an experts' report concluded Thursday in a case that is forcing Ireland to modernize its abortion laws.

A court hearing over organ donor matches involving children is on hold after the 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl at the center of the lawsuit received a lung transplant.

President Barack Obama's administration can go forward with its new plan to make the morning-after pill available to buyers of any age without prescriptions, but it needs to do it promptly or face potential sanctions in the long-running dispute over access to the emergency contraceptives, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

The Arizona Legislature has voted to end a special session ordered by Gov. Jan Brewer after passing an $8.8 billion budget that includes her Medicaid expansion plan.

Doctors should consider giving a daily AIDS drug to another high risk group to help prevent infections - people who shoot heroin, methamphetamines or other injection drugs, U.S. health officials said Wednesday.

Ireland will publish a long-awaited report into why a miscarrying woman died in an Irish hospital after being refused an abortion, authorities said Thursday as an opinion poll suggested strong public support for extending abortion rights.

A psychiatric patient has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in Nevada accusing state officials of giving him a one-way bus ticket to Northern California, where he arrived, scared and disoriented, without money and identification in a city where he didn't know anyone and had never been.