Cosmetic surgery is booming worldwide and unaffected by the health scare prompted by a French breast implant company that used substandard silicone, a global body of plastic surgeons said Friday.

The Paris-based IMCAS which represents plastic surgeons and dermatologists, said in a new study that beauty procedures worldwide including liposuctions, breast implants, and Botox injections grew 10.1 percent year-on-year in 2011 to between 3.2 to 3.8 billion euros ($4.1 to 4.9 billion).

Clinical trials in the United States and China have shown that a new gene-based test for patients with lung cancer beats standard methods in predicting survival, researchers reported Friday.

The findings, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, should help doctors to make more accurate prognoses and better choices for treatment, the scientists said.

Pollution in China's southern region of Guangxi sparked panic buying of bottled water this week after a mining firm dumped toxic cadmium into a river, according to state media.

Residents in Liuzhou city filled shopping carts with boxes of bottled water, as the government sought to reassure people that the drinking water supply was safe, Shanghai's Oriental Morning Post reported.

A person's lifetime risk of getting heart disease may be much higher than previously thought, according to a major U.S. study published on Wednesday.

A single risk factor -- such as smoking, having diabetes, high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol -- can significantly boost one's likelihood of having a heart attack or stroke at some point in life.

Mouth and throat infections of a common sexually transmitted disease known as human papillomavirus, which can lead to cancer, are more common among men than women, said a U.S. study on Thursday.

About seven percent of the U.S. population age 14-69 has oral HPV, said the research in the Journal of the American Medical Association, with a prevalence rate of 10.1 percent among men and 3.6 percent among women.

French police arrested Jean-Claude Mas, the founder of the breast implant company PIP at the center of an international health scare, police said Thursday.

"Jean-Claude Mas was arrested at the home of his companion ... and taken into custody," said a police source, adding that officers had picked him up on Thursday morning.

A genetic mutation appears to help survival rates in women who suffer from a common type of ovarian cancer, a new study released Tuesday found.

The research appearing in the January 25 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showed the mutations were found in six percent to 15 percent of women with epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC).

French scientists said on Tuesday that lack of a key brain protein was linked to Alzheimer's, a finding that threw up a tempting target for drugs to fight the disease.

"What we've found is a weapon for controlling and modifying tau," said Etienne-Emile Baulieu of France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), referring to a culprit involved in Alzheimer's.

Chemical compounds widely used in fast-food packaging, waterproof clothing and non-stick frying pans were linked in a study out Tuesday to lower immune response by young children to routine tetanus and diphtheria immunization shots.

California did not suffer a single death from whooping cough in 2011, the first year since 1991 that there have been no fatalities in the state from the highly contagious illness, health officials said Tuesday.

The news comes after the state experienced a whooping cough epidemic in 2010 when 9,000 were infected. Most vulnerable to the disease are infants too young to be fully immunized. Ten babies died after exposure from adults or older children.