Aging is typically studied in the elderly, but a study released Monday said different rates of aging can be detected as early as the mid-20s.

The findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' July 6 issue are based on a group of 954 people born in New Zealand in 1972 or 1973.

Twenty to 80 percent of women questioned in England, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand drank alcohol while pregnant, researchers said Tuesday, flagging a "significant public health concern".

Though most had "low levels" of intake, the data suggested that alcohol use in pregnancy was prevalent and socially pervasive, said a study in the journal BMJ Open.

New regulations aimed at rolling back Brazil's obsession with Cesarean sections took effect Monday, with the government hoping it can steer the country from its status as a world leader in C-section births.

The rules and a campaign called "Childbirth is normal!" address what Health Minister Arthur Chioro has dubbed an "epidemic" of Cesareans, currently accounting for more than half of births in this nation of 200 million.

Overwhelmed by hundreds of sick and wounded each day, hospitals in Yemen's second city Aden have been reduced to hospices lacking medicines and space as the country's bloodshed rages on.

"The world is watching us slowly die," said Abdullah Gahtan, a lawyer lying on a bed at Aden's Al-Sadaka hospital. 

A molecule that accumulates in the blood with age may be linked to cognitive decline, said scientists Monday who mooted hopes of a memory-restoring treatment.

The protein, dubbed B2M, is found in higher concentrations in the blood and cerebral spinal fluid of aging humans, they said.

A foreigner who flew to the Philippines from the Middle East has become the second confirmed case of MERS in the country, the health department said Monday, as a deadly outbreak in South Korea spreads alarm across Asia.

The 36-year-old male patient, whose nationality was not disclosed, has been put in isolation at a government facility to contain the virus, Health Secretary Janette Garin said.

A 36-year-old foreigner who arrived in the Philippines from the Middle East is under quarantine after testing positive for the MERS virus, health officials said Monday.

Philippine Health Secretary Janette Garin said several people the foreigner had come in close contact with have been traced. She said one of them, a Filipino woman exhibiting mild symptoms, had been isolated and that her test results were being awaited.

Traditional circumcision ceremonies in South Africa's Eastern Cape province, where the rite-of-passage practice is common, have left 14 boys dead and 141 injured this year, local authorities said Sunday. 

Many of the injured teens suffered from "dehydration, wounds, pneumonia, aseptic penis and gangrene" Sizwe Kupelo, spokesman for the health ministry in the Eastern Cape province told AFP. 

Dr. Gustavo Quintana walks out of a modest, two-floor apartment building in southern Bogota. Inside his black doctor's bag are vials containing anesthesia and muscle relaxants, a syringe and a rubber tourniquet. The man known in Colombia as Dr. Death has just ended the life of his 234th patient: a middle-aged woman suffering from incurable stomach cancer.

For years, Quintana and a handful of other physicians have been performing what they consider mercy killings in a semi-clandestine state, at risk of prosecution and amid widespread rejection from other doctors and church officials.

Mourdja's nose has been eaten away, like one lip and part of her upper gum, leaving the 13-year-old girl atrociously disfigured by noma, a disease that thrives on malnutrition.

"It was better before," the teenager says shyly and simply in the arid heartland of Niger, one of the world's poorest nations, clearly ill at ease and fiddling with her bracelets.