Dozens of makers of medicines and diagnostic tests have joined together in an unprecedented effort to tackle "superbugs" — infections that increasingly don't respond to drugs and threaten millions of people in countries rich and poor.

Altogether, 74 drugmakers, 11 makers of diagnostic tests and nine industry groups have signed a groundbreaking agreement to work with governments and each other to prevent and improve treatment of drug-resistant infections. They plan to announce the new agreement Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

A U.S. judge charged five people Wednesday with trying to steal trade secrets from the British pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

Of the five, two worked at a GSK research center in Upper Merion, Pennsylvania.

Eleven people have been killed by the swine flu virus in Syria since September, the country's health ministry said on Tuesday.

"Since September, 27 people infected with the H1N1 virus have been hospitalised. Eleven of them died," Ahmad Damiriyeh of the health ministry's division on chronic and contagious diseases was quoted in the state-run Al-Thawra daily as saying. 

At least 12 people have died of swine flu in Russia since last month, according to Agence France Presse calculations based on the statements of regional health authorities, as the virus gains ground in the country. 

Four swine flu-related deaths were recorded in the southern region of Rostov among the 120 reported cases of the virus in the area, authorities said Tuesday.

Women who carry an inherited fault in the BRIP1 gene are three times more likely to develop ovarian cancer than those without it, researchers said Tuesday.

The gene variant had already been linked to cancer of the ovaries, but the size of the additional risk has now been quantified in a study in the Journal of the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

A man who was left brain-dead after suffering serious side-effects during a drugs trial in France died on Sunday, according to the hospital which had been treating him.

Five other volunteers hospitalized a week ago when the drugs trial went wrong were "in a stable condition," the hospital in the western city of Rennes said in a statement.

Sierra Leone's government on Saturday urged the public not to panic as it announced that more than 100 people had been quarantined following a new death from Ebola just as the country seemed to have overcome the epidemic.

The World Health Organization on Friday confirmed that a 22-year-old woman who died after falling ill near the Guinean border last week had tested positive for the tropical fever.

French authorities launched three investigations Saturday at a research laboratory in Rennes after a drug trial conducted there left one person brain-dead and three others facing potentially irreversible brain damage.

Judicial police late Friday carried out the first searches at the Biotrial lab which had performed the trial on behalf of Portuguese pharmaceutical company Bial.

Ecuador said Friday it has detected its first two cases of the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease similar to dengue fever that has been linked to birth defects.

Ecuadoran officials had previously detected four people who arrived from other countries with the disease, which is spreading through Latin America and the Caribbean.

The United States warned pregnant women Friday to avoid travel to 14 countries and territories in the Caribbean and Latin America due to the mosquito-borne Zika virus, linked to birth defects.

"The virus is spreading fairly rapidly through the Americas," said Lyle Petersen, director of the division of vector-borne infectious diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a conference call with reporters.