China on Wednesday banned imports of some food products and additives from Taiwan after authorities in Taipei warned they were tainted with a chemical used in plastics, prompting a health scare.

The ban affects products including sports drinks, fruit juices and jams that Taipei said contained excessive amounts of DEHP, China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said in a statement.

Activists and experts pressed the U.S. Congress on Tuesday to do more to help promote worldwide awareness of autism, which they said is becoming an escalating health crisis.

"Autism is a 'developmental disability pandemic.' It is largely under recognized, under appreciated in its impact and under resourced," argued Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, who leads a House subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights.

Mobile phone users may be at increased risk from brain cancer and should use texting and free-hands devices to reduce exposure, the World Health Organization’s cancer experts said.

Radio-frequency electromagnetic fields generated by such devices are "possibly carcinogenic to humans," the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced at the end of an eight-day meeting in Lyon, France.

Taiwan and the Philippines have warned some sport drinks may have been contaminated with a chemical that could cause infertility and block boys' sex organ development, officials said Tuesday.

The Philippine Food and Drug Administration is monitoring some imported Taiwanese sport drinks, fruit juices and soft drinks that Taipei said may contain excessive amounts of DEHP, the agency's spokeswoman Jesusa Joyce Cirunay said.

Oxfam called on Tuesday for an overhaul of the world's food system, warning that in a couple of decades, millions more people would be gripped by hunger due to population growth and climate-hit harvests.

A "broken food system" means that the price of some staples will more than double by 2030, battering the world's poorest people, who spend up to 80 percent of their income on food, the British-based aid group predicted.

Illegal injections of a cancer-treating chemical pose a risk of death to legions of Filipinos who use them to try to whiten their skin, health authorities warned Tuesday.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suspects the drug glutathione is being injected in high doses as a skin-whitener, but said it can cause serious conditions including kidney failure and blood poisoning.

A growing shortage of medications for a host of illnesses — from cancer to cystic fibrosis to cardiac arrest — has hospitals scrambling for substitutes to avoid patient harm, and sometimes even delaying treatment.

"It's just a matter of time now before we call for a drug that we need to save a patient's life and we find out there isn't any," says Dr. Eric Lavonas of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Several lakeside towns in the Philippines on Monday were struggling to cope with mountains of rotting fish that were killed by a sudden drop in water temperatures at the weekend.

The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources said more than 750 tons of fish had died since Friday in Taal Lake near Manila, hitting several towns whose economies are heavily reliant on the fishing industry.

On June 5 1981, American epidemiologists reported a baffling event: five young gay men in Los Angeles, all previously healthy, had fallen ill with pneumonia. Two had died.

They would be the first casualties of a new virus which has now claimed more lives than a world war.

The head of the U.N. AIDS agency told a Vatican conference on AIDS Saturday that Pope Benedict XVI's comments about the use of condoms in preventing HIV transmission had opened new prospects for dialogue with the U.N.

Dr. Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, said it will help strengthen the fight for greater access to treatment for those afflicted. Sidibe said Benedict's views were important, even if differences remain between the U.N. and Catholic Church.