A former police officer who weighs 140 Kg was denied the right to obesity surgery will take his case to the Court of Appeals on Monday.

Tom Condliff, 62, says he needs the stomach operation to save his life but the North Staffordshire Primary Care Trust has ruled that his body mass index is not high enough to entitle him to funding for a gastric bypass operation.

Spanish surgeons on Monday carried out the world's first-ever double leg transplant, authorities in the eastern city of Valencia said.

The operation lasted all night and was completed on Monday morning in the city's La Fe hospital, the regional health authority said in a statement.

In a new campaign against obesity, the British government issued guidelines on Monday saying that children under the age of five — including those who can't even walk yet — should exercise every day.

In its first such guidelines for children that young, the health department said children under five who can walk should be physically active for at least three hours a day. Officials also said parents should reduce the amount of time such kids spend being sedentary while watching television or being strapped in a stroller.

For the first time, international researchers have identified a strain of gonorrhea that is resistant to treatment with antibiotics, scientists announced at a sex disease research conference Monday.

The common bacterial infection, often called the "clap," has until now been easily treatable with antibiotics but if left alone can cause infertility in women and painful urination and a pus-oozing infection in men.

More than six times the legal limit of radioactive caesium has been found in beef from Fukushima prefecture, home to Japan's crippled nuclear plant, an official statement said Saturday.

The meat came from one of 11 cows shipped this month to Tokyo from a farmer in Minamisoma city, according to the statement by the Tokyo metropolitan government.

The financial crisis that began to hit Europe in mid-2008 reversed a steady, years-long fall in suicides among people of working age, according to a letter published on Friday by The Lancet.

Researchers looked at mortality data provided by 10 European Union countries.

Many people are dying of hunger while fleeing serious drought in Somalia, the U.N. refugee agency said Friday, warning that aid efforts could be overwhelmed by large numbers of malnourished refugees.

"Many people are dying en route from what we hear," said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva.

Women who quit smoking once they find out they are pregnant can give birth to a baby weighing the same as a child born to a non-smoker, a British expert told a European fertility meeting Wednesday.

"Once you find you're pregnant, it’s not too late to do something about your smoking," Nick Macklon, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Southampton, told Agence France Presse.

Women trying to conceive are better served by a urine test to determine if they are ovulating than the more commonly used calendar method, the makers of the test said at a Stockholm conference Tuesday.

"The calendar method is good to help women to start to understand how their cycle works, but if women are really trying to conceive ... it's not really the best method to use," said Jayne Ellis, head of scientific and medical affairs at SPD Swiss Precision Diagnostics, which makes the Clearblue ovulation test.

A study found Monday that Pfizer's anti-smoking drug Chantix poses significant cardiovascular risks, a claim the pharmaceutical giant immediately denied while defending the drug's benefits.

According to the study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the drug varenicline (brand name Chantix) is linked to a 72 percent greater risk of hospitalization due to a serious adverse cardiovascular event like a heart attack or arrhythmia.