South Korea on Friday confirmed its first outbreak of bird flu for more than two years, with more than 100,000 birds slaughtered as authorities bid to contain the lethal virus.

Two poultry farms, one in the central city of Cheonan and the other in the southwestern city of Iksan, were confirmed to have been contaminated by the H5N1 virus, the agricultural ministry said.

Large amounts of rice noodles made with rotten grain and potentially carcinogenic additives are being sold in south China, state press said Friday, in the country's latest food safety scare.

Up to 50 factories in south China's Dongguan city near Hong Kong are producing about 500,000 kilograms (1.1 million pounds) of tainted rice noodles a day using stale and moldy grain, the Beijing Youth Daily said.

Two U.S. companies this year broke new ground by winning regulatory approval to start the first experiments using embryonic stem cells on humans suffering from spinal cord injury and blindness.

The potent but hotly debated cells can transform into nearly any cell in the human body, opening a path toward eliminating such ills as Parkinson's disease, paralysis, diabetes, heart disease, and maybe even the ravages of aging.

Saudi King Abdullah has left a New York hospital to convalesce, one month after he checked in for back surgery, the royal court announced on Wednesday.

King Abdullah left the hospital on Tuesday evening "for his New York residence for a period of convalescence and physiotherapy," the court said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.

Diabetes is costing the United States up to 160 billion dollars per year and might affect one-third of Americans by the middle of the century, former U.S. President Bill Clinton said in Dubai.

"By the middle of this century, the diabetes rate in the United States could be as high as one-third of our whole population," Clinton said on the sidelines of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Diabetes Leadership Forum held in Dubai.

Eight people have died from swine flu in England since early September, health authorities have told AFP, with Britain seemingly at the forefront of a winter resurgence in Europe.

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) insisted it was to be expected that the H1N1 strain of flu that caused the 2009 pandemic would be the most common strain this winter.

Haiti's cholera toll has risen above 900, including dozens of deaths in the teeming capital, as the epidemic showed no sign of abating just two weeks ahead of presidential elections.

Health Ministry officials reported Sunday more than 120 new deaths since the previous toll, as authorities and international aid agencies struggled to contain the latest crisis afflicting the desperately poor Caribbean nation.

A drug designed to treat high blood pressure also diminishes the debilitating symptoms of Parkinson's disease in mice, a study published Thursday has reported.

Because the drug, isradipine, has already been approved for human use, it could soon be available for Parkinson's patients, the lead researcher told AFP.

Mutations in a single gene can predict whether leukemia patients will suffer a more severe form of the disease, said a study released Wednesday that could change treatment for the blood cancer.

Patients with the gene mutation lived for a median of just over one year, while those without it lived for a median of three and a half years, according to the study in the November 11 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Speaking two languages can help delay the onset of Alzheimer's symptoms by as long as five years, Canadian scientists said.

The Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute researchers examined clinical records of 211 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and found that those who spoke two or more languages consistently over many years experienced a delay in the onset of their symptoms by as long as five years.