U.S. health officials launched a hard-hitting offensive Thursday aimed at slashing the numbers of smokers across the country following the success of a similar campaign last year.

The new campaign encourages smokers to kick the habit with a series of adverts spotlighting the wrenching personal stories of individuals battling smoking-related illnesses or diseases.

A Brazilian doctor charged with murdering seven hospital patients is now being investigated in connection with hundreds more similar cases of suspicious deaths.

A team led by health ministry investigator Mario Lobato is re-examining the 1,872 deaths that took place over the past seven years in the intensive care unit led by 56-year-old Virginia Soares de Souza.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday it approved a new drug from Biogen Idec to control multiple sclerosis in adults with hard-to-treat forms of the disease.

The twice-a-day capsules, called Tecfidera, offer a new option for multiple sclerosis, a debilitating disease in which the body attacks its own nervous system. U.S. -based Biogen Idec already sells two other drugs for the disease, but both require injections.

The biggest-ever trawl of the human genome for cancer-causing DNA errors has netted more than 80 tiny mutations, a finding that could help people at high risk, researchers said Wednesday.

The results, which double the number of known genetic alterations linked to breast, ovarian and prostate cancer, were unveiled in a dozen scientific papers published in journals in Europe and the United States.

The number of Americans who have survived cancer is on the rise and is expected to reach 18 million people in the next decade, according to a report released Wednesday.

That would be a 30 percent increase over the latest figures in January 2012, which showed 13.7 million people in the United States had survived some form of cancer, according to the American Association for Cancer Research.

Life expectancy in Russia has marked time since the collapse of the Soviet Union but risen in its former eastern-bloc allies, The Lancet reported on Wednesday.

Alcohol, tobacco and road accidents head a list of problems that lie behind premature death in the former Communist eastern Europe but remain chronic in many of the ex-Soviet republics, it said.

Britain is to launch a £179 million five-year healthcare program in the Democratic Republic of Congo which it hopes will reach six million people, Foreign Secretary William Hague announced on Tuesday.

The £179 million ($271 million, 211 million euros) fund will provide essential healthcare in an effort to bring peace, Hague said during a visit to the conflict-riven east of the country.

The harsh spending cuts introduced by European governments to tackle their crippling debt problems have not only pitched the region into recession — they are also being partly blamed for outbreaks of diseases not normally seen in Europe and a spike in suicides, according to new research.

Since the crisis first struck in 2008, state-run welfare and health services across Europe have seen their budgets cut, medical treatments rationed and unpopular measures such as hospital user fees introduced.

U.S. labs that research bioterror germs such as anthrax are at risk for accidents because they do not have uniform building and operation standards, a Congressional investigative group said on Monday.

A lack of oversight has persisted despite a 2009 report by the Government Accountability Office on the same topic, leaving no single agency in charge of safety or research goals at bioterror labs, the GAO said in its report.

A French drug watchdog on Tuesday released estimates for blood clots linked to birth control pills in the wake of fears that so-called third- and fourth-generation oral contraceptives boost a small risk of dangerous thrombosis.

Between 2000 and 2011, contraceptive pills were linked on average to 2,529 annual cases of blood clots, the National Agency for the Safety of Drugs and Health Products (ANSM) said.