French scientists said on Tuesday that lack of a key brain protein was linked to Alzheimer's, a finding that threw up a tempting target for drugs to fight the disease.

"What we've found is a weapon for controlling and modifying tau," said Etienne-Emile Baulieu of France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), referring to a culprit involved in Alzheimer's.

Chemical compounds widely used in fast-food packaging, waterproof clothing and non-stick frying pans were linked in a study out Tuesday to lower immune response by young children to routine tetanus and diphtheria immunization shots.

California did not suffer a single death from whooping cough in 2011, the first year since 1991 that there have been no fatalities in the state from the highly contagious illness, health officials said Tuesday.

The news comes after the state experienced a whooping cough epidemic in 2010 when 9,000 were infected. Most vulnerable to the disease are infants too young to be fully immunized. Ten babies died after exposure from adults or older children.

Foot and leg amputations were once a fairly common fate for diabetics, but new government research shows a dramatic decline in limbs lost to the disease, probably due to better treatments.

The rate has fallen by more than half since the mid-1990s, according to what is being called the most comprehensive study of the trend.

Mohammad Qasim, a 58-year-old butcher, is traumatized, depressed and anxious -- like 50 percent of his fellow Afghans after 30 years of war, according to government figures.

Qasim saw his wife, daughter-in-law and two grandsons aged five and six die in a horrific suicide bombing in Kabul last month.

Underfunded and short-staffed, Romania's health system is in need of intensive care, analysts say, warning that recent mass street protests should not derail a drive for reform.

The first use of embryonic stem cells in humans eased a degenerative form of blindness in two volunteers and showed no signs of any adverse effects, according to a study published by The Lancet on Monday.

Publication in the peer-reviewed journal marks an important step for embryonic stem cells, which were hailed as a miracle cure after they were discovered in 1998 but then ran into technical and political hurdles.

A crude new method of making methamphetamine poses a risk even to Americans who never get anywhere near the drug: It is filling hospitals with thousands of uninsured burn patients requiring millions of dollars in advanced treatment — a burden so costly that it's contributing to the closure of some burn units.

So-called shake-and-bake meth is produced by combining raw, unstable ingredients in a two-liter soda bottle. But if the person mixing the noxious brew makes the slightest error, such as removing the cap too soon or accidentally perforating the plastic, the concoction can explode, searing flesh and causing permanent disfigurement, blindness or even death.

A quarter-century after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first prescription drugs based on the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, additional medicines derived from or inspired by the cannabis plant itself could soon be making their way to pharmacy shelves, according to drug companies, small biotech firms and university scientists.

A British company, GW Pharma, is in advanced clinical trials for the world's first pharmaceutical developed from raw marijuana instead of synthetic equivalents— a mouth spray it hopes to market in the U.S. as a treatment for cancer pain. And it hopes to see FDA approval by the end of 2013.

Turkish surgeons on Saturday successfully performed the country's first-ever face transplant, the Anatolia news agency reported.

A team of doctors at Akdeniz University in the southern city of Antalya performed the operation on a 19-year-old boy whose face was burned when he was a 40-day-old baby, said Anatolia.