In the tobacco-producing heartland of China -- the world's largest cigarette market -- smoking is commonplace at work, in taxis and even in hospitals.

Snatching a break, construction worker Yao Xinggang takes deep puffs on a cigarette through a traditional-style water pipe.

U.S. fast-food chain Chipotle said Monday it had crossed off food made with genetically modified organisms (GMO) from its menus, saying they haven't been proven safe for consumption and the environment.

"There is a lot of debate about genetically modified foods," said Steve Ells, Chipotle's founder, chairman and co-chief executive, in a statement.

Professor Raghid Khouri, Head of the Department of Urology at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Notre Dame de Secours in Jbeil and president-elect of the Lebanese Association for urology, conducted the first of its kind surgery in Lebanon, the Middle East and Africa, to eradicate tumors that form in the bladder using a new technique known as the HybridKnife.

HybridKnife technique constitutes an important turning point in this type of surgery and helps to remove the tumors in a single bloc, which prevents the spread of cancer cells.

Women who are obese while pregnant may put their offspring at risk of childhood diabetes, a condition that requires lifelong insulin therapy, Swedish researchers said Tuesday.

A study of more than 1.2 million children born in Sweden between 1992 and 2004 and monitored for several years, found a 33-percent higher risk for the disease among children whose mothers were obese during the first trimester of pregnancy, but were not diabetic themselves.

The virus chikungunya has killed 25 people in Colombia in less than a year, the National Health Institute said Monday.

Since the illness was identified in Colombia in July 2014, more than 180,000 cases have been confirmed, 25 people have died, and another 17 deaths are still being investigated as possibly caused by the virus, data from the institute shows. 

More than half the population of rural areas worldwide do not have access to basic health care, with four in five rural Africans lacking services, the United Nations said Monday.

In the first report of its kind, the UN's International Labour Organization found that the rural-urban divide was omnipresent from the richest countries down to the poorest.

Sierra Leone marked the 54th anniversary of its independence on Monday by setting out a four-point "post-Ebola plan" to put the devastated country on the road to recovery from the deadly epidemic.

Almost 4,000 deaths have been registered since the epidemic spread from Guinea a year ago, although health authorities admit the real toll could be significantly higher.

Britain's first legally-approved HIV self-testing kit went on sale online on Monday, promising a result in just 15 minutes with a 99.7 percent accuracy rate.

Developers hope the BioSure HIV Self Test will help identify the estimated 26,000 people in Britain who have HIV but do not yet know.

A total of 23 people have now died from ethanol poisoning blamed on locally brewed gin in southwest Nigeria, the local health commissioner said on Monday.

"The total number of deaths is 23," Ondo state health commissioner Dayo Adeyanju told Agence France Presse by telephone. Last Monday the death toll stood at 18.

Police from seven European countries detained 26 people and seized hundreds of horse passports in a crackdown against a Europe-wide horsemeat trafficking ring, the EU's judicial agency Eurojust said Saturday.

Eurojust said in a statement that the swoop involving hundreds of police and judicial authorities "succeeded in stopping an organised criminal network involved in trade in illegal horsemeat."