The strain of H5H1 bird flu that killed a Chinese man cannot spread among people, a health agency said Monday, appealing for calm after the country's first reported case of the disease in humans in 18 months.

Genetic analysis indicated the virus spread directly from poultry to the victim, who died Saturday in the southern city of Shenzhen, the Shenzhen Disease Control Center said in a statement reported by the official Xinhua News Agency.

French breast implant manufacturer PIP used an untested fuel additive in its now-banned implants that have triggered a worldwide scare, French radio station RTL reported Monday.

RTL said it obtained an exact breakdown of the materials used in the faulty implants, including Baysilone, Silopren and Rhodorsil, all of which are industrial products never tested or approved for clinical use.

Here's another reason for holdouts to join the social media site Facebook: It's a great place to find a kidney.

Between the children's photos and reminiscences about high school, more and more pleas for help from people with failing kidneys are popping up. Facebook and other social media sites are quickly becoming a go-to place to find a generous person with a kidney to spare, according to the people asking for help and some national organizations that facilitate matches.

The World Health Organization is warning that dangerous scientific information could fall into the wrong hands after U.S. government-funded researchers engineered a form of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus more easily transmissible between humans.

In a strongly worded statement Friday, WHO said it was "deeply concerned about the potential negative consequences" if the results of the study were used to create biological weapons or the mutated virus was accidentally released.

A bus driver in southern China who contracted the bird flu virus died Saturday, health authorities said, in the nation's first reported human case of the deadly disease in 18 months.

China had reported its first human case of bird flu in 18 months, after a bus driver in the massive southern boomtown of Shenzhen tested positive for the deadly virus.

French health authorities said Friday that 20 cases of cancer had been uncovered in women with allegedly faulty French-made breast implants but insisted there was still no proven link with the disease.

France's state health insurance fund meanwhile said it had filed a fraud complaint against manufacturer Poly Implant Prothese (PIP), which sold hundreds of thousands of implants made with sub-standard silicone gel around the world.

Vietnam says an outbreak of hand, foot and mouth disease has infected more than 110,000 people this year and killed 166, most of them children under 5 years old.

A Health Ministry official said Friday that the infection rate was slowing from a September peak of 3,000 per week to about 1,500 per week in December. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing policy.

Taiwan is considering banning doctors from performing gender screening of foetuses in a bid to curb sex-selective abortions, health authorities said Friday.

The bureau of health promotion said it was reviewing the issue after up to 3,000 female babies were presumed to have been aborted in Taiwan last year.

The use of anti-depressant drugs in England has soared by 28 percent in the past three years, coinciding with the country's fall into recession and the global economic crisis, new figures showed Friday.

Prescriptions went up from just under 34 million to 43.4 million between 2007-08 and 2010-11, according to figures from the National Health Service (NHS) Information Centre.

Chinese authorities have recalled cooking oil products made by three companies after finding they contained the same type of cancer-causing toxin recently found in milk, state media said Thursday.

A product safety watchdog in the southern province of Guangdong suspended operations at plants owned by the firms, which made oil containing excessive levels of aflatoxin, caused by mold, the Xinhua news agency said.