Pakistan has shut down leastwise temporarily a pharmaceutical factory accused of manufacturing medicine supposed to have taken the lives of over 100 heart patients, an official said on Thursday.

“We recovered raw material weighing 48 kilograms used for the medicine Isotab from the Efroze Chemicals factory and sealed it for 14 days on Wednesday,” said Akbar Baloch from the Federal Investigation Agency.

The factory was closed after a London laboratory appeared to find Isotab…

Governments should tax sweetened drinks and food as part of their efforts to combat the dangers to health posed by sugar.

So says a commentary, published on Thursday in the journal Nature as part of a widening debate among doctors and policymakers about food fiscality and health.

Around 35 million people die each year of non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes and a wave of obesity is unfurling from rich countries to developing economies, say …

A funding gap at Planned Parenthood has been filled by donors after a major breast-cancer charity pulled its support for the nation's top abortion provider. The very public split between longtime partners Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation foretold how abortion could be a pivotal issue in November's presidential and congressional elections. More than (Dollor) 400,000 has so far been pledged online by 6,000 donors, a day after the row broke out, on t...

A report by World Health Organization has stated that worldwide deaths from malaria may be almost twice as high as previously estimated.

But there is also good news: deaths from the mosquito-borne disease have in fact been falling sharply thanks to access to better drugs and insecticide-treated nets.

Published in The Lancet on Friday, the study by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, Seattle, says malaria killed at least 1…

After nearly a decade of declines, some 60,000 more cases of measles cases were reported worldwide in 2010 mostly due to outbreaks in Africa and Europe, according to US health authorities.

Due to a boost in global efforts to vaccinate people against measles, total cases declined from more than 853,000 in 2000 to nearly 278,000 in 2008, and remained stable in 2009.

But 2010 saw an increase to 339,845 measles cases, driven largely by outbreaks in Africa and Europe, said the…

Iraq parliament bans smoking in public. “The law aims to protect citizens from the danger of tobacco and reduce the number of smokers by taking measures to combat this plague,” the law reads.

Smoking in government offices, schools, universities, hospitals, airports, offices, theatres, gathering places, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, markets and petrol stations will now be banned.

The law is to take effect 90 days after it is published in the official gazette. br…

One million packets of birth control pills have been recalled by Pfizer in the US over a packaging error that could put women at risk of unintended pregnancy.

The pills, about half of which were the brand name Lo/Ovral-28 and the other half were generic norgestrel and ethinyl estradiol tablets, may be improperly arranged so that inactive pills are taken at the wrong time in the monthly cycle.

“An investigation by Pfizer found that some blister packs may contain an inexact…

A magazine advert for an anti-aging moisturizer by L'Oreal has been banned by British regulators. This was after upholding a complaint that the image of the model, actress Rachel Weisz, was misleading. The two-page ad for Revitalift Repair 10, which appeared in September, featured a black and white close-up photograph of Weisz and a list of the ten properties of the cream, including reducing the appearance of wrinkles. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it had...

One million packets of ibirth control pills/i were recalled in the US by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer because of a packaging error that could put women at risk of unintended pregnancy.

The pills, about half of which were the brand name Lo/Ovral-28 and the other half were generic norgestrel and ethinyl estradiol tablets, may be improperly arranged so that inactive pills are taken at the wrong time in the monthly cycle.

Doctors described the recall as “very seriou…

Following a defective breast implant case that triggered a global health scare, France called for Europe-wide controls and vowed on Wednesday to strengthen the regulation and monitoring of prosthetics.

More than 400,000 women around the world are thought to have received implants made by Poly Implant Prothese (PIP), which shut in 2010 after it was found to have used substandard, industrial-grade silicone gel.

French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand said inspections of manu…

Researchers have come closer to helping people communicate after paralysis or stroke after US scientists announced on Wednesday they found a way to decode how the brain hears words.

By placing electrodes on the brains of research subjects and then having them listen to conversations, scientists were able to analyze the sound frequencies registered and figure out which words they were hearing.

“We were focused on how the brain processes the sounds of speech,” researcher Br…

US researchers have hit upon a rather inexpensive, dependable and reversible male contraceptive from zapping testicles with ultrasound. This method can reduce sperm count.

Scientists from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who conducted experiments on male rats, issued their findings on Saturday in the journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology.

They said they were convinced that the method, if studied further, could be used on humans.

T…

In the northeast of the Indian city of Pune lies the Bhagyalaxmi Dairy Farm on a rutted country track, amid dusty brown scrub and lush green parcels of a farmland.

With a herd of more than 3,000 cows, a state-of-the-art milking parlour and on-site bottling plant using French technology, it’s a world away from traditional Indian village farming.

The 10.5-hectare (26-acre) farm, owned by Parag Milk Foods Ltd, provides milk for its Pride of Cows brand, which at 75 rupees ( (Dollor) 1…

After 28 years, Indonesian twin sisters have been reunited in southern Sudan.

Non-identical twins Emilie Falk and Lin Backman — strangers until last year — were separated nearly 29 years ago.

According to a DNA test the pair had done two months after reuniting in January last year, and which they shared with AFP, there is a 99.98 percent chance of them being sisters.

A complex string of events led up to that revelation.

Both were adopted from a…

Kalydeco, a new, gene-targeted drug treatment for people who have a rare kind of the incurable lung disease cystic fibrosis was approved by US regulators on Tuesday.

Made by the Massachusetts-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Kalydeco (ivacaftor) was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration on a fast-track for drugs that may offer big advances over standard therapy.

The drug works to restore the balance of salt and water on the surface of the patient’s airways, a proce…

The part of the brain used for speech processing has been identified in a different location than originally believed, US study found and researchers said this will require a rewrite of medical texts. Wernicke's area, named after the German neurologist who proposed it in the late 1800s, was long believed to be at the back of the brain's cerebral cortex, behind the auditory cortex which receives sounds. But a review by scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center of ...

In Taiwan, tougher checks on illegal sex-selective abortions prevented nearly 1,000 terminations of female foetuses, say health authorities. Taiwan's health authorities moved to tighten curbs on the illegal abortions last year, warning that doctors found guilty of the practice could have their licenses revoked. "The strict measures have paid off," Lee Tsui-feng, an official at the Bureau of the Health Promotion, told AFP. Government figures showed that 1...

As part of a new, global push to eradicate tropical diseases, key players in the pharmaceutical industry have pledged to donate 14 billion drug treatments.

Thirteen companies including Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline have committed to the programme being led by the United States, Britain and United Arab Emirates governments, the Bill (and) Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank.

The drugs will target sufferers of so-called Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) such as leprosy …

Consumption of beer in Germany, which has been progressively waning over the last decade, was a tad lower again last year, official data pointed on Monday. The federal statistics office Destatis calculated that German breweries sold a total 98.2 million hectolitres of beer in 2011, 0.1 percent less than in 2010. Domestic beer sales were down 0.8 percent at 82.7 million hectolitres, while beer exports increased by 4.0 percent to 15.5 million hectolitres, Destatis said in a...

FDA approved erivedge – a new drug to treat basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer.

Erivedge (vismodegib) is made by Genentech, a US subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, and was approved by the Food and Drug Administration after an expedited review for drugs that offer the potential for major advances in treatment.

The drug is the first of its kind for patients whose basal cell carcinoma has spread either locally or to other parts of the body,…

At Davos, it was the centre of attention seizing the imagination of a forum usually cloaked in gloom: a miracle machine that cracks the code of life within hours and might even revolutionise healthcare.

Patients will no longer have to wait weeks to know if they have cancer and their doctors will know immediately what kind of disease they have, allowing them to target therapies precisely and to avoid harmful delays or mistakes.

Health officials confronted by superbug outbr…

Lydia Abulanda and her neighbors are rebuilding less than six weeks after killer floods swept away their slum homes along a Philippine river.

In a poverty-driven tale repeated with depressing frequency across the storm-plagued Southeast Asian nation, Abulanda said they had no other option but to take their chances again in the danger zone.

“We have nowhere else to go,” the 41-year-old housewife said as she stood amid the shantytown ruins of Iligan city, where tropical sto…

Thousands of people filled Trafalgar Square in London to celebrate Year of the Dragon.

London Mayor Boris Johnson said the big turnout “shows the way the world economy is going”, as people braced the chilly weather to see performers parade through the city and sample Chinese food.

Trafalgar Square is around the corner from London’s Chinatown district.

The festivities to welcome in the Year of the Dragon, which officially started on January 23, included a …

By 2110, Japan’s population is expected to shrink two thirds, reveals report.

The population is forecast to decline from the current 127.7 million to 86.7 million by 2060 and to tumble again to 42.9 million by 2110 “if conditions remain unchanged”, the health and welfare ministry said in the report.

The projections by the ministry’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecast that Japanese women would on average have just 1.35 babies, well …

In a recent study it was found that bugs that cause pneumonia and meningitis have evolved to evade vaccine by gene swapping method.

The findings, published in Nature Genetics, show how quickly these life-threatening pathogens can disguise themselves with borrowed genetic decoys, and how hard it is for medicine to keep up.

Diseases caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae are thought to kill over a million young children around the world each year.

Vaccines tha…

Established to repel diseases killing about four million people annually, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is shifting focus under new leadership while yet struggling to ward off corruption charges and keep its coffers full.

Founded on January 28, 2002, the Geneva-based fund has grown quickly into a major player in global health and can take credit for saving millions of lives, mostly in low income nations.

In 2009 it accounted for 20 percent of inte…

Same-sex marriages and civil unions in the USA are here to stay even with obstinate opposition from social conservatives, said the head of the nation's premier gay rights group on Friday. "Absolutely. The trajectory is moving forward. It's clear," said Rea Carey of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force at a four-day annual gathering of around 3,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in Baltimore. Setbacks such as Proposition Eight, which saw voters ...

Soaring oil prices and freezing economic times are propelling growing numbers of Greeks to chop down trees for winter warmth, warned a group of forest engineers on Tuesday.

Nikos Bokaris, a spokesman for the Panhellenic Union of Forest Engineers, said the debt-wracked nation’s forest ecosystems were not yet under threat, but urged the government to act quickly to prevent broader damage.

“You have to remember what happened in Albania,” Bokaris said, describing how that coun…

Neckties seem to have made it to the wardrobe of the stylish young.

“I never wear one,” Antoine Arnault, the 34-year-old son of luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault told AFP on the sidelines of the first ever menswear show by the LVMH-owned shoemaker Berluti — where ties were a full part of the look.

“Except on Monday afternoons when I have appointments with my father. If I didn’t have a tie I’d be the odd one out.”

On Saturday, his father was tie-less as he sat fro…

US regulators are investigating a California man who donates his sperm for free to couples who want to have a baby. Despite this, he insists that he will continue his efforts as a matter of goodwill.

Trent Arsenault, 36, first attracted scrutiny from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2009 for his free sperm donations, which he says resulted in 14 births with several more babies on the way.

A cease-and-desist letter from the FDA in November 2010 did not dissuade him -…