Polonium first hit the headlines when it was used to kill KGB agent-turned-Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

This week, Yasser Arafat's widow has called for the late Palestinian leader's body to be exhumed after scientists in Switzerland found elevated traces of radioactive polonium-210 on clothing he allegedly wore before his death in 2004.

An 8-year-old girl has died of bird flu in Indonesia's eighth death from the disease this year.

The Health Ministry said the girl, from the West Java district of Karawang, died Tuesday in a Jakarta hospital that had treated her since June 28.

Honduran authorities are investigating the deaths of 17 people who were apparently poisoned by drinking alcohol that had been mixed with methanol, officials said Thursday.

"We are conducting toxicology tests and autopsies on the bodies to see if the deaths are due to the consumption of liquor," a public prosecutor from the northern city of Siguatepeque, Israel Euceda, told Agence France Presse.

Los Angeles County voters are to decide if condom use should be obligatory for pornographic actors, after AIDS campaigners said Thursday they had collected enough signatures for a November ballot.

The campaigners submitted more than 360,000 signatures to support enforcing condom use in the U.S. porn movie industry, which is based in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.

A U.N. commission has set a recommended limit on the amount of melamine allowed in liquid infant formula after a 2008 scandal in China in which six babies died from drinking formula and milk products containing the industrial chemical.

Two years ago, the U.N. food security body known as the Codex Alimentarius Commission set the maximum limit of melamine in powdered infant formula at 1 milligram per kilogram of formula. On Wednesday, the commission said it had adopted a limit for liquid formula at 0.15 milligrams/kilogram.

Conflict in Afghanistan and vaccination problems in Pakistan have led to a rise in polio cases there, imperiling efforts to wipe out the disease worldwide, a study said Wednesday.

Newly introduced vaccines had the potential to eliminate polio in these countries if sufficient numbers of children could be reached, according to the paper, published in The Lancet medical journal.

Women infected with a parasite spread by cat feces run a higher risk of attempting suicide, suggests a study of more than 45,000 women in Denmark published in a scientific journal this week.

"We can't say with certainty that T. gondii caused the women to try to kill themselves," said Teodor Postolache of the University of Maryland medical school, senior author of the study in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Every year in Japan people are hospitalized after eating puffer fish; sometimes the result is fatal. But despite apparent dangers, strict rules on serving the toxic delicacy in Tokyo are to be relaxed.

Aficionados say the tingle that the meat of the puffer fish leaves on your lips -- caused by the potent neurotoxin it contains -- is part of the appeal.

Fifty-six people including six children have been hospitalized in Georgia with chlorine poisoning after a storage tank leaked overnight in a suburb of the capital Tbilisi, officials said Wednesday.

"At around midnight in the Lilo district of Tbilisi there was a leak from a chlorine container. As a result, 56 people were poisoned and taken to hospital," interior ministry spokesman Zurab Gvenetadze told Agence France Presse.

The prescription drug methadone is linked to over 30 percent of painkiller overdose deaths, according to a report released by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention Tuesday.

"Death from opioid overdose have increased four-fold in the past decade, and methadone now accounts for nearly a third of opioid-associated deaths," said CDC Director Thomas Frieden.