The Waikato District Health Board has written to parents of children attending schools or early education centres in Te Awamutu advising them of the outbreak, which involved students from a local college.

Papamoa five-year-old Zahnee Campbell has a debilitating birth defect, thought to be the only one of its kind in New Zealand.

Two Australian mothers are having their blood screened after each accidentally breastfed the other's baby.

Gill South gets altruistic and donates, not her blood (mad cow issue), but her time to a very good cause.

Foreign patients treated in New Zealand hospitals owe the system at least $19 million.

Northland Health has recorded 298 cases of norovirus, with several patients still being kept in isolation.

The ACC has admitted it has been rejecting too many claimants seeking elective surgery.

Patients being given the wrong prescription occurs "a lot", according to the Health Quality and Safety Commission, but a new system should help prevent cases like the tragic death of Shirley Curtis.

The Ministry of Health needs to sit down and talk with families who are caring for their disabled relatives, say the Greens.

An expert says many more babies would survive if the country quit smoking and reduced its obesity.

Food manufacturer Sanitarium has produced a scheme for a national "traffic light" food labelling system.

Doctors flying to New South Wales to work weekends are earning as much as $8200.

A man weighing more than 200 kilograms has died in hospital, after staff could not give him life saving treatment because he was too heavy for them to roll.