A Mexican man who was once the world's heaviest human, weighing 597 kilos (1,316 pounds) at one point, has died at the age of 48, medical officials said Monday.

Preliminary reports say Manuel Uribe died due to an irregular heartbeat and an ailment linked to the loss of fluids in his legs, an official at the University Hospital in the northern city of Monterrey told AFP.

While heroin use in Europe is declining, ever more people are getting their fix from prescription drugs, including some used to treat heroin addiction, a report said Tuesday.

It also warned of a flood of new, synthetic drugs, and of established ones like ecstasy and cannabis becoming more potent.

Competition, pressure and harassment: France's white-collar employees are facing a growing litany of "brutal" psychological risks in the workplace, according to experts.

Despite France's labour laws, some of the strongest in the world, depression, long-term illness, professional burnout and even suicide are becoming increasingly common among service-sector workers.

Australian conjoined twins Hope and Faith, who shared a body and skull but had separate brains and identical faces, have died almost three weeks after they were born in Sydney, medical officials said Tuesday.

The girls, who were born six weeks early by emergency caesarean, were with their parents -- Renee Young and Simon Howie -- when they passed away, the Nine television network reported.

Sierra Leone on Monday confirmed its first death from Ebola, with several more suspected to have succumbed to the deadly virus that swept across neighboring Guinea earlier this year.

"I can categorically confirm that the Ebola sickness has materialized," said health ministry official Amara Jambai.

Lack of funds is forcing aid workers to deny Syrian war victims and other refugees with cancer the care they need, the U.N. refugee agency's top medical expert warned on Monday.

With millions of Syrians driven from their homes by three years of conflict, and huge numbers having fled a decade of violence in Iraq, health systems in the region have been overwhelmed.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a new antibiotic from Durata Therapeutics to treat adults with common skin infections often acquired in U.S. hospitals.

Regulators approved the intravenous drug Dalvance to treat bacterial skin infections caused by common bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant strains of those germs.

New York City is using a novel way to uncover cases of food poisoning — reading Yelp restaurant reviews.

Health officials found three unreported outbreaks by sifting through nearly 300,000 reviews on the popular website. The outbreaks were small, together blamed for only 16 illnesses.

Ordering an unnecessary pacemaker, urging a woman to be hospitalized for a sore throat -- a doctor's allegations of corruption spotlight troubles so endemic in China's healthcare system that patients frequently turn violent.

Lan Yuefeng, a former hospital ultrasound chief, ignited fury when she accused her hospital of exploiting the sick by routinely overprescribing medicine and treatment.

Tennessee has decided how it will respond to a nationwide scarcity of lethal injection drugs for death-row inmates: with the electric chair.

Republican Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill into law Thursday allowing the state to electrocute death row inmates in the event prisons are unable to obtain the drugs, which have become more and more scarce following a European-led boycott of drug sales for executions.