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The government ministers were facing a new infectious disease outbreak. The mysterious virus was sickening and killing people with alarming speed. Some patients had to be placed on ventilators to help them breathe. The new virus seemed resistant to antibiotics and antiviral medicine. Within a week, officials had closed a major hospital and schools and quarantined thousands of people. Fear and panic spread quickly as people in neighboring countries became infected and died. (Sun, 10/24)

The company stacked brochures in funeral parlors around Sin City. On the cover: a couple clasping hands. Above the image, a promise: “Providing Options in Your Time of Need. ”The company, Southern Nevada Donor Services, offered grieving families a way to eliminate expensive funeral costs: free cremation in exchange for donating a loved one’s body to “advance medical studies.” (Grow and Shiffman, 10/24)

The Environmental Protection Agency’s revised rule on arsenic contamination in drinking water has resulted in fewer lung, bladder and skin cancers. In 2006, the E.P.A. reduced the arsenic maximum in public water systems to 10 milligrams per liter, from the previous level of 50 milligrams. The rule does not apply to private wells. (Bakalar, 10/24)

Diseases get their names from a variety of sources — from Latin or Greek root words, from place names, from the clinician who discovered them, or a well-known patient who had them. But we throw disease names around so commonly these days that many of the decades- or centuries-old origins are long forgotten or overshadowed by their modern meaning. (Samuel, 10/24)

For needle-phobic people, flu shot season is ripe with mental tennis matches centered around if it’s worse to get the vaccine or chance the sickness. Georgia Tech and Emory researchers may have found the cure to this seasonal internal struggle: a painless, self-administered microneedle patch. (Derreberry, 10/24)

Doctors were baffled when a 21-year-old woman was admitted into an Italian hospital for “sweating blood” from her face and her hands, a condition she's had for three years, according to two physicians from the University of Florence. It's a condition few doctors have seen, and some have questioned whether sweating blood is even possible. But it turns out dozens of similar cases have come to light since about 2000. (Eltagouri, 10/24)

Elisha Cooke-Moore had been told she had cancer-causing genes. The 36-year-old mother said an obstetrician-gynecologist noted that the results of her genetic testing showed she had a 50 percent chance of getting breast cancer and up to an 80 percent chance of getting uterine cancer, so she underwent a recommended double mastectomy and hysterectomy to try to beat the odds. (Bever, 10/24)

Massachusetts General Hospital this month became the first US hospital to launch use of a new mammography system designed by Boston-based General Electric Co. that is designed to make the experience more comfortable. The system from GE’s health care division has a hand-held remote that allows patients — not the medical professional administering the test — to control the level of pressure they feel during the exam. (Dayal McCluskey, 10/24)