John Shoemaker visited six doctors in his quest to find the best treatment for his early stage prostate cancer — and only the last one offered what made the most sense to the California man: Keep a close watch on the tumor and treat only if it starts to grow.

Very few men choose this active surveillance option. Yet Shoemaker is one of more than 100,000 American men a year deemed candidates for it by a government panel. That is because their prostate cancer carries such a low risk of morphing into the kind that could kill.

Doctors in Chile are optimistic about the survival of a 10-month-old girl who was separated from a conjoined twin who died following the surgery.

Little Maria Paz awoke for the first time since the operation nearly a week ago, and Dr. Carlos Acuna calls that "an excellent sign." He says she's been successfully switched to a common respirator and her condition is favorable.

The percentage of male children born in Armenia has risen significantly due to an increase in female feticide, the United Nations Population Fund said on Monday.

More than 7,000 Armenian women have had selective abortions over the past five years, according to a new study carried out by the U.N. Population Fund with the Armenian health ministry and the Institute of Perinatology.

Eating less may keep the mind young, according to Italian scientists who reported Monday they have discovered the molecular process by which a strict diet may save the brain from the ravages of age.

The research, published in the U.S. journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on a study of mice that were fed a diet of about 70 percent of the food they normally consumed.

The highly-contagious Novovirus has forced the closure of manyhospital beds across Britain, prompting warnings from health officials about the serious threat posed by the bug, best known as the winter vomiting virus.

Maurice Madeo, deputy director of infection prevention and control at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, where wards have been closed to new admissions, said the condition could be fatal.

They are already calling it the "widow village." In the space of just a few short days, the close-knit community of Sangrampur in eastern India -- along with a number of smaller surrounding villages -- has been devastated by a case of mass poisoning from toxic, home-brewed alcohol.

So far 170 people have died, almost exclusively men, most of whom were the sole bread-winners in families that were already struggling with life on the poverty line.

Conjoined 10-month-old twin girls separated by a Chilean medical team are in critical condition after the surgery, and one is close to death, hospital officials said Friday.

"Their condition is grave, but it is very important that we point out that their recovery has not been equal," said Osvaldo Artaza, director of the Hospital Luis Calvo Mackenna where the twins were separated in a grueling operation that began Tuesday.

A Hong Kong school was closed on Friday after a dead bird found in the southern Chinese city was tested positive for the deadly H5 strain of the bird flu virus, health officials said.

The closure came after the school clerk, a 48-year-old woman, picked up the sick black-headed gull at the school on Tuesday, which died the next day and was tested positive for the H5 strain, a health department spokesman told Agence France Presse.

Cigarette and alcohol use by U.S. teenagers are at their lowest point since the mid-1970s, but marijuana use remains steady, according to the findings of a national survey released Wednesday.

Some 18.7 percent of grade 12 high school students, typically aged 17 or 18, reported smoking cigarettes in the latest Monitoring the Future, well down from a peak of 36.5 percent in 1997.

A batch of home-brewed liquor possibly laced with a lethal dose of the highly toxic chemical methanol has killed more than 100 people in eastern India, according to an official.

Hospitals near the impoverished district of 24-Parganas, 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the West Bengal state capital Kolkata, have been overwhelmed by victims, many of them laborers and rickshaw drivers too poor to afford branded alcohol.