Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk A/S says its net profit grew by 35 percent in the third quarter of 2012, chiefly spurred by strong sales of its diabetes drugs.

The world's biggest insulin maker says net profit during the period rose to 5.67 billion kroner ($983 million) from 4.2 billion kroner a year earlier.

Australia on Wednesday moved to extend punitive refugee policies to any asylum-seeker who lands on its mainland, allowing for them to be banished to remote Nauru or Papua New Guinea for detention.

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen introduced a proposal to expand the government's powers to send boatpeople for indefinite detention in the Pacific across the entire mainland, not just the remote islands where most land.

Drug-resistant malaria is spreading in Asia, experts warned as a high-level conference opened Wednesday with the aim of hammering out an action plan to strengthen the region's response.

Resistance to the drug used everywhere to cure the life-threatening disease has emerged in Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar, said Richard Feachem, director of global health at the University of California, San Francisco.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has the highest rate of malnutrition in central and west Africa, affecting 43 percent of children under five, UNICEF said Tuesday.

In central Africa, "some countries have a rate of chronic malnutrition which is still alarming," Marianne Flach, the representative of the U.N. children's agency in Congo, said at the opening of a regional workshop on reducing malnutrition.

Outdoor clothing from top manufacturers is frequently contaminated with chemicals that are harmful to health and the environment, Greenpeace warned Monday.

The environmental group said in a study that the materials that make many clothing items useful in wind, rain and snow are also toxic.

Two U.N. agencies have mapped the intersection of health and climate in an age of global warming, showing that there are spikes in meningitis when dust storms hit and outbreaks of dengue fever when hard rains come.

Officials said Monday that their "Atlas of Health and Climate" is meant to be a tool for leaders to use to get early warning of disease outbreaks.

American and international doctors will discuss the safest ages to play tackle football at the Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sport this week.

More than 100 medical experts from around the world, including leading U.S. doctors Stanley Herring and Robert Cantu, will take part Thursday and Friday.

The benefits of preemptive breast cancer screening outweigh the risks, a study said Tuesday, insisting the practice saves thousands of lives.

The new research adds to the debate about the dangers of over-diagnosis, which sees some women undergo invasive treatment for cancers that would never have made them ill or even been diagnosed were it not for the scans.

Scientists in Britain say they have developed a super-sensitive test using nano-particles to spot markers for cancer or the AIDS virus in human blood serum using the naked eye.

As it does not need sophisticated equipment, the test-tube technique should be cheap and simple, making it a a boon for disease detection in poor countries, the team wrote in Nature Nanotechnology on Sunday.

As the world struggles with a growing obesity epidemic, Slow Food gurus from the U.S. and Australia are urging international campaigners gathered in Italy to join a revolution in the way children eat.

"Australia has exactly the same problem as almost any other developed country: a very large obesity rate. Something must be done, globally," Melbourne chef Stephanie Alexander said at the world's largest food fair in Turin.