Municipal rubbish trucks blocked the entrances to a refinery and four chemical plants in Israel's third city Haifa Monday following a scare over high cancer rates, a municipal spokesman said.

The standoff began on Sunday morning when Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav ordered municipal rubbish trucks to block access to the plants after warnings linking high cancer rates in the area to air pollution.

Fast food giant McDonald's said Monday it was aware of a New Zealand woman's allegation she found a half-eaten cockroach in a hamburger bought at one of its South Island restaurants.

Annah Sophia Stevenson told Fairfax New Zealand that she bought a Big Mac meal on Saturday night then found the cockroach when she was back at home and part-way through eating the burger .

Canadian health officials have  quarantined another poultry farm found to be infected with bird flu, authorities said.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said tests were conducted Friday after the "sudden deaths" of some chickens confirmed the presence of the virus.

Nigerian health authorities said on Monday that ethanol poisoning from a local gin may have been responsible for the sudden death of 18 people last week.

"We strongly suspect ethanol poisoning and in view of this, we have ordered for another toxicology test for the surviving victims," Ondo state health commissioner Dayo Adeyanju told Agence France Presse.

The mayor of Haifa, Israel's third largest city, ordered Sunday the closure of five petrochemical plants following a health ministry warning linking high cancer rates to air pollution. 

Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav further said that municipality trucks were blocking the entrances to Israel Oil Refineries and Petroleum & Energy Infrastructures, both of which are based on the bay in the northern port city. 

A "mysterious" disease that kills patients within 24 hours has claimed at least 17 lives in a southeastern Nigerian town, the government said Saturday.

"Seventeen people have died of the mysterious disease since it broke out early this week in Ode-Irele town," the government spokesman for Ondo state, Kayode Akinmade, told AFP by telephone.

GlaxoSmithKline is recalling remaining doses of a popular four-in-one flu vaccine because of effectiveness problems.

The company alerted U.S. customers Tuesday that the vaccine can lose potency over time and fail to adequately protect against some strains of the flu. The Flulaval Quadrivalent Thimerosal-free vaccine in prefilled syringes is designed to protect against four strains of influenza virus.

An outbreak of measles that popped up at Disneyland in late December soon spread to six other U.S. states, Mexico and Canada. Health officials suspect an infected traveler, who caught the virus overseas, visited the theme park and exposed others.

The outbreak sickened 147 people in the U.S., including 131 in California. No deaths were reported.

The three West African countries hit hardest by the Ebola epidemic called for an $8 billion "Marshall Plan" on Friday to help rebuild their economies and boost prevention efforts.

With the number of new cases having dwindled after the disease took more than 10,000 lives over the past year, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone said they need much more financial aid to overcome the disaster and ensure it can't happen again.

A remote tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon appears to be resistant to modern antibiotics even though its members have had barely any contact with the outside world, researchers said Friday.

The people, known as the Yanomami, were first spotted by air in 2008, and were visited a year later by a Venezuelan medical team that took samples from 34 of them, including skin and mouth swabs and stool samples.