Thirty years into the AIDS epidemic, a cure remains elusive but a growing arsenal of drugs could someday help end new infections, the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS chief says.
The key is figuring out how to best manage the latest advances, Gottfried Hirnschall said in an interview with Agence France Presse during a visit to Washington this week ahead of the International AIDS Conference that begins here July 22.

A Chinese province urged parents Sunday to seek immediate treatment for children showing symptoms of hand, foot and mouth disease after official figures showed 112 people died from the illness last month.
The disease, which children are especially vulnerable to, also infected more than 381,000 people, the Ministry of Health reported last week.

Anil Kanade seems almost too stunned to speak about the deadly cancer recently found in his mouth, caused by his addiction to a popular Indian chewing tobacco that doctors say is fuelling an epidemic.
Like millions of young Indians, the factory worker was for years hooked on "gutka" -- a cheap, mass-produced mix of tobacco, crushed areca nut and other ingredients that several states are now trying to wipe out.

A German court decision branding the Muslim and Jewish rite of circumcising baby boys a criminal act has left disbelief, outrage and serious legal questions in its wake.
A cartoon in Sunday's edition of Berlin daily Tagesspiegel cast the dispute over the ruling published last month as a high-stakes struggle between religious beliefs and European secular values.

Croatia's parliament on Friday passed a new fertility law, easing what had been some of Europe's most restrictive measures, despite opposition from the Catholic Church and conservatives.
The new law notably authorizes the freezing of embryos and recognizes the right of single women to assisted fertilization.

Cat Pause proudly describes herself as "fat", can live with euphemisms like "curvy", "chunky" or "chubby", but baulks at what she believes are value-laden labels such as "overweight" or "obese".
The U.S.-born academic is a pioneer in the emerging field of fat studies, organizing New Zealand's first conference on the topic at Massey University's Wellington campus on Thursday and Friday.

Cholera is rising in the last major town held by Somalia's al-Qaida linked Shehab, with most of those stricken by the disease children, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned Friday.
The U.N. agency "is very much concerned about the increased number of cholera cases, particularly in Kismayo town," it said in a statement, warning that the infectious diarrheal disease could kill within hours if untreated.

An Israeli man living in New York has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for buying kidneys illegally off Israelis and selling them on for $120,000 and more a time to U.S. recipients.
Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, 61, located individuals in Israel willing to be paid for their kidneys and arranged their travel and accommodation in the United States, where hospitals were given a fake story making it appear the kidneys had been donated.

Managers of Guatemala's biggest hospital have declared the facility to be in a state of emergency due to a massive supply shortage.
"There are no sutures, bandages, gauze, laboratory tests or X-rays, so we have decided to declare a state of calamity," Roosevelt Hospital's board president Arnoldo Lopez told reporters late Wednesday.

Ever since the popular painkiller pill OxyContin became harder to crush into powder two years ago, many U.S. drug abusers have turned to heroin instead, researchers said Wednesday.
The formula change did not appear to stop people from snorting or shooting up, but rather caused them to switch to a dangerous street drug that mimics the same high, said a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine.
