The death toll from a meningitis outbreak linked to tainted drugs rose to 30 as the number of cases climbed to a whopping 419, U.S. health officials said Monday.

Some 14,000 people in 23 states are at risk after having received potentially tainted doses of the steroid from the New England Compounding Center.

Researchers said Tuesday they had seen the earliest-ever warning signs of Alzheimer's Disease -- among a high-risk group of 20-somethings -- in the ongoing quest for early detection and prevention.

A major problem in the search for a cure for this debilitating form of dementia is that symptoms appear years after irreversible brain decay has already set in.

New research shows that people with diabetes and several clogged heart arteries fare better with bypass surgery instead of having stents placed to prop open their blood vessels.

Doctors compared the treatments in a study of 1,900 diabetics and looked five years later to see how many had suffered a heart attack, stroke or death. Only 19 percent of the bypass group had, versus 27 percent of those given stents.

At a remote medical outpost near the jungle-blanketed Thai-Myanmar border, a villager pricks the finger of a feverish baby living on the frontline of the war on drug-resistant malaria.

The tiny walk-in clinic -- and hundreds more like it scattered along Thailand's porous frontiers -- are a key part of efforts to stop the spread of the lethal new strain from Southeast Asia to the Indian subcontinent and Africa.

A Saudi man has been cured after he was diagnosed with a mystery illness from the same family as the deadly SARS virus and from which one person died, the kingdom's health ministry said on Sunday.

He was "diagnosed with a coronavirus infection at a hospital in Riyadh," the ministry announced in a statement reported by the official SPA news agency.

Crammed into squalid camps, thousands of people who fled communal violence in Myanmar face a deepening humanitarian crisis with critical shortages of food, water and medicine, aid workers say.

More than 100,000 people have been displaced since June in two major spasms of violence in western Rakhine State, where renewed clashes last month between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims uprooted about 30,000 people.

The European Commission said Friday it had no intention for the moment to ban or impose limits on perfumes or cosmetics found to cause an allergic reaction, a spokesman said Friday.

A scientific review has identified about 100 ingredients which could cause allergies and recommended that some be limited while others, such as tree mosses used in the famous Chanel 5 perfume, be banned outright.

Close monitoring of prostate cancer tumours may make radiation and surgery -- which can cause incontinence and impotence -- unnecessary, a new study has shown.

Prostate cancer is one of the slowest-growing forms of the disease, and many men with tumours may never develop symptoms during their lifetime, meaning that many are treated unnecessarily -- often with serious side-effects.

An Indian panel Friday revoked a patent granted to Swiss giant Roche for a hepatitis C drug, marking the latest setback for global pharmaceutical firms in the country's $12 billion medicine market.

The Intellectual Property Appellate Board overturned the patent awarded by the Indian Patent Office to Hoffmann-La Roche's drug Pegasys, citing a lack of evidence that it was a "new class" of drug.

China will start phasing out its reliance on organs from executed prisoners for transplants early next year as a new national donation system is implemented, a government-appointed expert has said.

Chinese officials acknowledge that a transplantation system that uses mostly organs from death-row prisoners is neither ethical nor sustainable, Wang Haibo said in an interview in the November edition of the World Health Organization's journal Bulletin.