Behind air-tight doors in a lab in a southern French city, scientists in protective coveralls wage war against a fingernail-sized danger.

Lurking in net cages is their foe: the Asian tiger mosquito, capable of spreading dengue fever and other tropical diseases in temperate Europe.

That's the message state and county fair visitors got Thursday from health officials who reported a five-fold increase of cases of a new strain of swine flu that spreads from pigs to people. Most of the cases are linked to the fairs, where visitors are in close contact with infected pigs.

This flu has mild symptoms and it's not really spreading from person to person.

U.S. health officials are telling doctors they should consider an AIDS prevention pill for women and heterosexual men at high risk for getting the virus.

The government previously advised doctors to give the once-a-day pill Truvada to high-risk gay and bisexual men only. However, there are an estimated 140,000 heterosexual couples in which one person is infected with HIV.

An outbreak of cholera in Guinea has killed 60 people since February and is showing no signs of letting up, the country's health ministry said Thursday.

Officials have registered 2,054 cases, with the capital Conakry and the south-western city of Forecariah worst affected.

From deformed infants to grandparents with cancer, families near Vietnam's Danang Airbase have long blamed the toxic legacy of war for their ills. Now after a decades-long wait, a historic "Agent Orange" clean-up is finally beginning.

The base was a key site in the U.S. defoliant program during the Vietnam War, and much of the 80 million liters (21 million gallons) of Agent Orange used during "Operation Ranch Hand" was mixed, stored and loaded onto planes there.

Hong Kong said Thursday it will test babies who have consumed two Japanese-made infant formulas found to have low levels of iodine, after the products were ordered off the city's shelves.

The move came after officials found the Wakodo and Morinaga formula brands lacked sufficient iodine, and warned they could have "potential adverse health effects" on babies' thyroid glands and brains.

Death knows the small town of Prieska all too well.

A poisonous legacy of South Africa's years as a global blue asbestos hub, the Grim Reaper has snaked through here for decades, wiping out families and striking down neighbors with deadly precision.

A big U.S. government study shows that in the past decade, the proportion of children who have high cholesterol has fallen.

The results are surprising, given that the childhood obesity rate didn't budge.

Fewer than half of U.S. adults get enough physical activity for their health, said a U.S. government study released Tuesday.

In a country where two thirds of the population is overweight or obese, just 48 percent get enough exercise, said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Eight million chickens have so far been slaughtered in Mexico and 66 million more were vaccinated in a bid to contain a bird flu outbreak in the west of the country, authorities said Tuesday.

The agriculture ministry said in a statement that during the vaccination process in the Los Altos region of Jalisco state, diseased chickens were identified, leading to the destruction of the flu-carrying fowl.