Vietnam has approved a new 23-million-dollar fund to tackle bird flu after new strains of the virulent disease emerged in the communist country this year, the health ministry said.

The fund, made up of 13 million dollars of aid and 10 million dollars in loans from donors, aims to improve co-ordination between officials in the health and agricultural sectors, according to the ministry's website.

A Canadian witness told a trial over alleged illegal organ trafficking in Kosovo how he received a kidney at the Medicus clinic -- and may even have flown in with his young Russian donor.

Raul Fain, 66, testifying by video link from Ontario, Canada, told the court Friday he had had transplant surgery in mid-2008 at the Medicus clinic, which has since been shut down.

The British government will introduce a minimum price per unit of alcohol in England and Wales to tackle their infamous binge-drinking culture, Prime Minister David Cameron announced on Friday.

Cameron said a minimum price of around 40 pence ($0.60, 0.50 euros) per 10-millilitre unit of alcohol would help stop the "scourge of violence" caused by rowdy revelers in town centers and would cut alcohol-related deaths.

Twelve people have died from swine flu in India since the beginning of March and nearly 110 others have been infected with the virus, the country's health ministry said.

The ministry announced in a statement late on Thursday that the victims were from the western states of Maharashtra and Rajasthan as well as southern Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

China will abolish the transplanting of organs from executed prisoners within five years and try to spur more citizens to donate, a top health official says.

Rights groups call transplants from condemned prisoners a form of abuse and allege that the government, which executes far more people than any other nation, pressures them to donate organs. The government, however, says prisoners volunteer, and that the change is being made because prisoners are less healthy than the general population.

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire who has made reducing smoking one of his signature causes as mayor of New York City, is committing $220 million to his charity to go toward reducing tobacco use in countries that are home to millions of smokers.

He announced his four-year commitment to Bloomberg Philanthropies at the 15th World Conference on Tobacco or Health in Singapore on Thursday. The new commitment will bring the total amount he has directed to his eponymous charity to over $600 million for anti-smoking efforts since 2007.

Brazil said Wednesday it has temporarily suspended the import of breast implants pending quality control tests in the wake of last December's health scare over defective French-made implants.

A spokeswoman for the National Health Surveillance Agency(ANVISA) said a resolution had been approved to insist that the implants be allowed into the country only after quality certification.

Allergy season has come early and hit with a wheezing vengeance in parts of the South and Midwest this year, thanks largely to an unusually warm winter. Abundant pollen is causing watery eyes, sniffles and sneezing.

Doctors say the spring misery stretches from Mississippi to Ohio and from Georgia to Texas, where drought conditions have exacerbated the problem. Forecasters and allergists blame the unseasonably warm weather, and few cold snaps, for causing plants to bloom weeks early and release the allergy-causing particles.

Identifying lines on a color-coded metro map is tricky for those who can't see some colors. Choosing clothes or telling a green from a red apple can be just as baffling.

But the pioneering work of a designer in the northern Portuguese city of Porto means such quandaries may soon pose less of a challenge for the color blind.

Too often, people pass a cardiac checkup only to collapse with a heart attack days later. Now scientists have found a clue that one day may help doctors determine if a heart attack is imminent, in hopes of preventing it.

Most heart attacks happen when fatty deposits in an artery burst open, and a blood clot then forms to seal the break. If the clot is too big, it blocks off blood flow.