A Mexican man believed to be the world's most obese plans to undergo gastric bypass in the new year and reduce his 590 kilos (1,300 pounds) by half, his doctor said Wednesday.

The man known as Juan Pedro has diabetes, high blood pressure and chronic lung obstruction, and needs to reduce his weight dramatically to reduce his health risks, doctor Jose Castaneda Cruz said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered tighter regulations on alcohol as the death toll among those who drank bath essence containing toxic methanol rose to 62 in Siberia.

Israel's army is to relax its disciplinary action against soldiers accused of smoking cannabis while on leave, a general overseeing the reform said Wednesday.

Japan began killing about 122,000 farm birds on Tuesday to contain another outbreak of a highly contagious strain of avian flu, officials said.

Dozens of health facilities supported by the World Health Organization in strife-torn areas of Sudan risk closure due to a lack of funds, exposing one million people to likely epidemics.

Police in Montreal Friday raided six cannabis shops one day after they opened, following a warning by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that recreational marijuana is not yet legal in Canada.

Thrusting their arm into a box full of hungry mosquitoes, a group of brave volunteers in a Burkina Faso laboratory test an innovative weapon in the fight against malaria -- soap.

The team behind the "Faso Soap" project aims to create a cheap, accessible product to repel mosquitoes and protect people from a disease that claimed nearly 500,000 lives in 2015, most of them in Africa.

Britain's fertility regulator on Thursday gave the green light for the country to become the first in the world to legally offer "three-parent baby" fertility treatments.

A hospital in northern Italy said Wednesday it had achieved a world first by successfully transplanting a kidney in the place of the spleen in a six-year-old girl.

South Korea said Tuesday it was expanding a major bird flu cull to try and contain a damaging outbreak that has continued to spread during an all-consuming political crisis.

Since the first case of the highly pathogenic H5N6 virus was confirmed in mid-November, another 43 cases have been reported and close to 10 million chickens and ducks have already been slaughtered in farms across the country.