A novel strain of the deadly SARS virus that sparked a health scare this year is closely related to a virus found in Asian bats, according to a study published on Tuesday.

Scientists in the Netherlands said they had sequenced the genetic code of a viral sample taken from a 60-year-old man whose death in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in June triggered fears that Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was returning in a new guise.

The United Nations says that Sudan has launched a massive vaccination campaign to immunize 2.4 million people against an outbreak of yellow fever in the restive region of Darfur.

The Monday statement from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says Khartoum's Health Ministry received an initial shipment of 800,000 doses of vaccine on Friday.

People living in the tropics are likely to die more than seven years younger than those in other regions, according to the first findings of a global research project released Monday.

The "State of the Tropics" study, run by 13 institutions across 12 countries, reported that people living in the world's tropical zones in 2010 had an average life expectancy of 64.4 years.

French health care giant Sanofi Pasteur will soon test a vaccine against dengue fever in India amid concerns about the increasingly global spread of the disease, reports said Monday.

The vaccine will be tried on about 120 adults followed by trials on children before it can be made available internationally as soon as 2015, the Times of India newspaper said.

Tens of thousands of Spanish doctors, nurses and hospital staff marched through the capital Madrid on Sunday to denounce budget cuts and privatisations, the latest protest against deeply unpopular austerity measures.

Dressed in white, the protesters chanted "Public health!" and "Health is a right. We are going to fight."

Europe's top drug regulator has recommended approval for the first vaccine against meningitis B, made by Novartis AG.

There are five types of bacterial meningitis. While vaccines exist to protect against the other four, none has previously been licensed for type B meningitis. In Europe, type B is the most common, causing 3,000 to 5,000 cases every year.

The lives of at least 750,000 premature babies could be saved every year by taking simple and inexpensive steps to limit preterm birth, the world's largest killer of newborns, U.N. health experts said Friday.

"There are many interventions that can save lives and improve the quality of these babies' lives that are not high-skilled intensive care but that are simple interventions," said Elizabeth Mason, who heads the World Health Organization's Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health.

Improving sanitation and building more toilets could save millions of lives around the world and would remove an important source of inequality, the U.N. said Friday ahead of World Toilet Day.

“Eliminating inequalities can start in the most unlikely of places: a toilet,” said Catarina de Albuquerque, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation.

The world's largest agency that deals with global migration says cholera is again on the rise in Haiti.

The International Organization for Migration says Haitian officials have confirmed 3,593 cholera cases and another 837 suspected cases since Hurricane Sandy's passage.

India's rural development minister said Friday the country's public health system had "collapsed" in a blunt assessment of his government's failure to extend a social safety net for the poor.

Jairam Ramesh, known as a maverick with often outspoken views, stressed that 70 percent of spending on health was out of people's own pockets, making it the single most important reason for indebtedness in rural areas.