The closure of sections of Italy's main steel plant as part of an investigation into health and environmental pollution sparked heated reactions on Friday, as hundreds of workers went on strike.

"In this serious moment for the country's economy, taking actions this traumatic against the biggest steelworks factory in Europe is an unbearable blow," said the head of Italy's manufacturing association Pier Luigi Ceccardi.

New York's John F. Kennedy Airport is a teeming hub for international flight -- and globe-trotting germs, a new study says.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology paper published this week named JFK as the top of a list of "super-spreaders" in contagious diseases.

The German makers of thalidomide were warned of birth defects years before it was withdrawn and Australian distributors used pregnant women as the world's first test subjects, court papers alleged Friday.

Affidavits sworn in the lawsuit of an Australian woman born without limbs after her mother took thalidomide claimed that the drug's maker Grunenthal ignored and covered up claims that it caused birth defects dating back to 1959.

A top Indian minister has proposed projects worth $130 million project to rid India of the scourge of open defecation and clean up a rail system he described as the world's "largest open toilet", reports said Friday.

Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh told a meeting in New Delhi on Thursday that India, where 130 million households are without a latrine, accounted for 60 percent of the global volume of open defecation.

Drug testers sifting through raw sewage in 19 European cities found the highest cocaine use in Antwerp, a Nordic preference for methamphetamines and Amsterdam unsurprisingly leading in cannabis use.

From the biggest-ever European drug analysis of human waste samples, the research team deducted that the continent used about 350 kilograms of cocaine every day while marijuana remained the most popular illicit drug.

A French researcher has built a device allowing disabled people to write or draw on a computer screen using only their eyes, a report said Thursday.

With head-mounted cameras monitoring their eye movements, test subjects were able to write and draw on a blank computer screen in the latest breakthrough for people trapped in immobility by disease or accident.

Gay sex in a conservative Catholic society where the influential church forbids the use of condoms is fuelling an alarming rise of HIV infections in the Philippines, experts warn.

The Southeast Asian country is facing a HIV epidemic, with sex between men making up nearly 90 percent of all new cases, according to the health department and the United Nations' Development Program (UNDP).

Scientists in the United States said Wednesday they had used a cancer drug to flush out the AIDS virus lurking dormant in trial patients' white blood cells -- a tentative step towards a cure.

The ability of the HIV genome, or reproductive code, to hide out in cells and be revived after decades poses a major obstacle in the quest for a cure.

Poor hygiene and sanitation stemming from a lack of water is contributing to soaring child mortality rates in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, a U.N. envoy said Thursday.

U.N. special rapporteur on the right to water and sanitation Catarina de Albuquerque said urgent action was needed to address water shortages among the country's 100,000 population.

Mexico will start vaccinating some 10 million poultry Thursday against the highly contagious bird flu strain that has already led to the deaths of five million birds which either fell ill or were slaughtered.

"Starting tomorrow, we are going to vaccinate hens and chicks across the country to put an end to this bird flu epidemic," Mexican President Felipe Calderon said.