A French court on Thursday found German safety standards firm TUV liable in a global scare over defective breast implants and ordered the company to compensate distributors and victims.

The court in the southern city of Toulon ruled that TUV Rheinland had "neglected its duties of checking and vigilance" after having certified that implants made by Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) conformed to European safety rules -- even though they were subsequently found to have been made of substandard, industrial-grade silicone gel.

British gynaecologists warned on Friday that increasing numbers of teenage girls and women are undergoing genital cosmetic surgery, driven in part by unrealistic images of how they should look based on pornography.

The state-funded National Health Service (NHS) performed more than 2,000 labial reduction procedures -- labiaplasties -- in 2010, a five-fold increase in ten years, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG).

A 29-year-old man has died from bird flu in Cambodia and a toddler is critically ill with the virus after carrying sick and dead poultry from a market, health authorities said Thursday.

The man died in early November in western Pailin province near the border with Thailand after being admitted to hospital with a fever, the World Health Organization and Cambodia's Ministry of Health said in a joint statement.

Kuwait has reported its second case of the deadly MERS coronavirus for a man who just returned from abroad, the health ministry said.

In a statement cited by the official KUNA agency late Wednesday, the ministry said the new case was for a 52-year-old Kuwaiti national who was in a stable condition.

A healthy baby boy was born in eastern Hungary after his brain dead mother was kept alive for about three months to bring him to term, a hospital said Wednesday.

"The baby is already growing up at home, with his family. He was delivered by caesarean during the summer," Bela Furedi, president of the Debrecen University's medical science center, told journalists.

Only 106,000 people enrolled in the new U.S. health plan in its first month and only a quarter did so on a faulty government website, in early failures for President Barack Obama's top domestic achievement.

Government figures published Wednesday were the first official snapshot of the progress of "Obamacare" which has been plagued by glitches since it debuted on October 1.

Researchers in Taiwan on Thursday called on watchdogs to keep up their guard after a flu virus that commonly circulates among chickens was found for the first time in a human being.

The strain found in a 20-year-old patient from central Taiwan was of relatively low virulence, but the risk is that it could mix with other viruses to become more dangerous, they said.

Kuwait has discovered its first case of the MERS coronavirus for a citizen who is in "critical condition," the health ministry said on Wednesday.

"The first case of coronavirus has been discovered in the country for a citizen who was moved to the Infectious Diseases Hospital in critical condition," the ministry said, quoted by the official KUNA news agency.

An outbreak of polio that has paralyzed 13 children in war-torn Syria is linked to a strain of the virus from Pakistan, the World Health Organisation said Monday.

The vaccination of children in Syria has been disrupted by the 31-month conflict between President Bashar Assad's forces and rebels fighting to topple his regime.

More Americans should take cholesterol-lowering medication, according to new guidelines released Tuesday by the American Heart Association.

"This is a dramatic change from the 2002 federal cholesterol guideline," said the AHA in a statement, noting that drugs called statins should now be prescribed to some 33 million Americans.