The world’s tobacco merchants are down on Australia after the country’s highest court backed the toughest cigarette-labelling rules anywhere.

Greek authorities announced the arrest of 17 HIV-positive women who allegedly worked illegally as prostitutes, accusing them of intentionally causing serious bodily harm.

A greater investment in research and a focus on early intervention treatments to help those with autism is required urgently, writes Dr Geraldine Leader

A guide to surviving a zombie apocalypse has been published in America.

THE country’s three children’s hospitals have been forced to cancel all non-emergency admissions and restrict visitors to wards after becoming inundated with patients suffering from swine flu symptoms.

Health officials in China today confirmed the country’s second mainland swine flu case in a week – a student who recently returned from Canada – and stepped up screening for domestic travellers.

Bangladesh’s first human case of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has been detected, health officials said today, calling on residents not to panic.

A MAN smuggled a monkey onto an plane, stashing the furry, fist-size primate under his hat until passengers spotted it perched on his ponytail, an airline official said.

SEAN FLEMING’S letter about water fluoridation communicated some inaccuracies and made some scientifically unfounded connections between water fluoridation and the incidence of a range of diseases (Irish Examiner, April 11).

Twenty-five years after the first AIDS cases jolted the world, US scientists think they soon may have a pill that could prevent HIV, the virus that causes the disease.

China today reported its second confirmed human fatality from bird flu.

THE Indonesian authorities are investigating whether a 20-year-old woman who lived near a flock of sick chickens died from bird flu after falling ill with symptoms of the disease, a hospital spokesman said yesterday.

An Indonesian women has died of suspected bird flu, a hospital spokesman said today, adding that tests would be carried out to confirm the cause of death.

Blacks make up more than half of new HIV infections annually in the United States and about two-thirds of new Aids cases among teens, though they represent less than 15% of the nation’s population, according to a report.

Anti-smoking advocates are highly critical of Whoopi Goldberg’s new television comedy series Whoopi, in which she plays a chain-smoking innkeeper.

I WRITE in response to the latest “final” June 4 decision of the Department of Health and Children’s expert group on SARS and the Special Olympics to maintain its ban on Hong Kong’s disabled athletes travelling to Ireland, thus depriving them of the chance to attend what likely would be the most thrilling event in their lives.

CHINA, accused by the World Health Organisation of dramatically under-reporting SARS cases in Beijing, dug in its heels yesterday, refusing to revise its toll and insisting it is dealing responsibly with the outbreak.

A MAN who was admitted to a midlands hospital with suspected Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is not suffering from the virus.