About 300 AIDS patients and their relatives have torn down the main gate of a government office in central China during a protest over unmet demands for financial assistance.

Protester Li Xia says police in Zhengzhou city beat some of the patients with batons after the group gathered outside the Henan provincial government office Monday and blocked the main gate to demand a meeting with officials.

A U.S. appeals court on Friday refused to order the Obama administration to stop funding embryonic stem cell research, despite complaints the work relies on destroyed human embryos.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Washington area upheld a lower court decision throwing out a lawsuit that challenged federal funding for the research, which is used in pursuit of cures to deadly diseases. Opponents claimed the National Institutes of Health was violating the 1996 Dickey-Wicker law that prohibits taxpayer financing for work that harms an embryo.

An Alzheimer's treatment from Eli Lilly and Co. failed to slow memory decline in two separate patient studies, but the drug did show some potential to help in mild cases of the mind-robbing condition that is notoriously difficult to treat.

The Indianapolis drug maker’s announcement could be a step toward a long-awaited breakthrough in the fight against the disease. But researchers not tied to the studies — and Eli Lilly itself — cautioned against overreacting to the initial results.

A U.S. court on Friday shot down orders to slap graphic anti-tobacco messages on cigarette packs, saying the government overstepped its authority by trying to "browbeat" smokers into quitting.

In line with campaigns in several other nations, the United States planned from September 22 to require images on cigarette packs including a man smoking through a hole in his throat and a body with chest staples on an autopsy table.

Drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. has scrapped a potential hepatitis C treatment after a patient participating in a test of the drug died of heart failure.

The New York Company said Thursday that it decided to discontinue development of the drug, labeled BMS-986094, in the interest of patient safety.

Legionnaire's disease, which hit Quebec in mid-July, has infected 65 people and killed six, health authorities of the French-speaking Canadian province said.

"We are very concerned by the current situation," Quebec public health chief Francois Desbiens said.

Sierra Leone's health ministry said Thursday that deaths from a cholera outbreak had reached 220, affecting over 12,000 people in the West African nation, which is struggling to curb the disease.

"Some 12,140 people are affected nationwide in 10 of 12 districts," the health ministry's director of disease prevention and control, Amara Jambai, told journalists, saying the figure included cases recorded up to Wednesday.

U.S. health researchers said Thursday that they have documented lead poisoning risks among pregnant women who took Ayurvedic medicine and issued a new warning on the safety of traditional pills.

New York City health authorities probed six cases since last year of women -- all but one born in India -- found to be at high risk of lead poisoning due to Ayurvedic medicine, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Do older fathers doom their children to genetic disease? This is the question raised by a new study that says older men produce moregene mutations in the children they sire, boosting their risk of schizophrenia and autism and possibly other diseases.

Doctors are reporting a new benefit from weight-loss surgery — preventing diabetes. Far fewer obese people developed that disease if they had stomach-shrinking operations rather than usual care to try to slim down, a large study in Sweden found.

The results, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, are provoking fresh debate about when adjustable bands and other bariatric procedures should be offered.