A Saudi court has dismissed an $8-million lawsuit filed against tobacco companies by a cancer-sufferer who blamed smoking for his damaged health, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Al-Hayat said the General Court in Jeddah on Monday dismissed the legal action against tobacco distributing companies in Saudi Arabia and denied the plaintiff his claim of 30 million riyals (around $8 million) compensation.

Bulgaria's veterinary service on Monday ordered the slaughter of all cattle in a village close to the country's southeast border with Turkey after cases of foot-and-mouth disease were confirmed there.

More than 500 animals in the mountain village of Kosti are to be destroyed after 37 tested positive for foot-and-mouth disease, the national veterinary service said in a statement.

Five thousand dead blackbirds rained from the sky on the first day of the New Year in Arkansas. Then more dead birds fell in other states. Then huge fish kills were discovered in multiple US waterways.

And suddenly it became a worldwide phenomenon, with reports of mass die-offs of birds and fish in Sweden, Britain, Japan, Thailand, Brazil and beyond.

The Health Ministry's Director-General, Walid Ammar, reassured the Lebanese on Friday that the H1N1 strain has become similar to seasonal flu saying there were currently some cases in Lebanon but not as much as last winter's levels.

In remarks to Voice of Lebanon radio station, Ammar said illness caused by the virus requires no extraordinary measures and that complications could only arise in pregnant women, children under the age of five and people with chronic diseases.

Britain's food safety watchdog has said that egg tainted with dioxin that has been imported into the country after being contaminated in Germany is not thought to be a risk to health.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) said they had been informed that affected eggs were sent to the Netherlands and mixed with other non-contaminated eggs to make a pasteurized liquid egg, which was then exported to Britain.

China has ordered dairy firms to apply for new production licenses this year in a move designed to improve product quality and safety in the scandal-hit industry, state media said Thursday.

The move comes in the wake of a deadly 2008 health scare sparked by the discovery that the industrial chemical melamine had been widely and illegally added to milk products to give it the appearance of a higher protein content.

One out of five patients who receive a well-known cardiac implant don't need it and are at greater risk of dying of heart attacks because of the device, a U.S. study said.

The survey of more than 100,000 patients who had received implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) "found that about 20 percent did not meet evidence-based guidelines for receipt of an ICD," researchers said.

Tuberculosis patients are 11 times more likely than the average to develop lung cancer, according to a new study published by a group of Taiwanese scientists.

The researchers followed more than 700,000 randomly selected individuals over a period of six years, including 4,480 diagnosed with tuberculosis, they said in a statement Wednesday.

Malaysia has delayed a landmark field trial to release genetically modified mosquitoes designed to combat dengue fever, an official said Tuesday, following protests from environmentalists.

In the first experiment of its kind in Asia, 4,000-6,000 male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were originally scheduled to be released by last month in a bid to fight dengue, which killed at least 134 people last year in Malaysia alone.

A blood test so sensitive that it can spot a single cancer cell lurking among a billion healthy ones is moving one step closer to being available at your doctor's office.

Boston scientists who invented the test and health care giant Johnson & Johnson will announce Monday that they are joining forces to bring it to market. Four big cancer centers also will start studies using the experimental test this year.