Amylin Pharmaceuticals won approval Friday for its long-delayed diabetes drug Bydureon, a next-generation treatment that requires fewer injections than the company's 7-year old diabetes medicine, Byetta.

Bydureon is a once-a-week version of Byetta, which is taken twice a day to control blood sugar. Amylin executives say the new drug's convenient regimen will give it a competitive advantage in the marketplace. After multiple delays however, it enters a crowded market, including one diabetes treatment in the same class that has shown superior results.

U.S. authorities on Friday seized nine shipments of orange juice from Brazil and Canada after their contents tested positive for an illegal fungicide.

The Food and Drug Administration said the orange juice tested positive for carbendazim, a pesticide that is not legal for use on oranges in the United States but is approved in Brazil and some other countries.

Around 100 Pakistani heart patients have died after taking faulty medicine made locally and dozens more are in a critical condition in hospital, government officials said Thursday.

"Nearly 100 patients have died due to a reaction to heart drugs," said Shahbaz Sharif, the head of the government in central Punjab province.

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).