Dengue fever has surged in the central Philippines, infecting more than 1,800 people and killing at least ten, a provincial official said Saturday.

The number of people struck down by the mosquito-borne disease in the central province of Iloilo this year is already 71 percent higher than the same period last year, provincial administrator Raul Banias told Agence France Presse.

The World Health Organization announced Friday it had convened emergency talks on the enigmatic, deadly MERS virus, which is striking hardest in Saudi Arabia.

The move comes amid concern about the potential impact of October's Islamic hajj pilgrimage, when millions of people from around the globe will head to and from Saudi Arabia.

First cousins who marry run twice the risk of having a child with genetic abnormalities, according to the findings of a study in the English city of Bradford, published Friday in The Lancet.

The city, which has a high proportion of South Asian immigrants and their descendants among its population, served as a microcosm for examining the risk of blood relative couplings.

Scientists in Japan said they had grown human liver tissue from stem cells in a first that holds promise for alleviating the critical shortage of donor organs.

Creating lab-grown tissue to replenish organs damaged by accident or disease is a Holy Grail for the pioneering field of research into the premature cells known as stem cells.

The new MERS coronavirus that has claimed dozens of lives in the Middle East does not yet have the ability to trigger a pandemic, but vigilance is needed in case it mutates, French scientists said on Friday.

"Our analysis suggests that MERS-CoV does not yet have pandemic potential," they reported online in The Lancet.

At least 11 people have been killed in an outbreak of H1N1 flu virus in northern Chile, where the rate of infection is more than six times higher than the rest of the country, authorities said Thursday.

"The average across the country is 24 patients per 100,000 residents, but in Tarapaca, in the past week, the rate was 148 patients per 100,000 residents," Medical Association president Enrique Paris said.

An environmental group said Wednesday that the caramel coloring used in Pepsi still contains a worrisome level of a carcinogen, even after the drink maker said it would change its formula.

In March, PepsiCo Inc. and Coca-Cola Co. both said they would adjust their formulas after California passed a law mandating drinks containing a certain level of carcinogens come with a cancer warning label. The changes were made for drinks sold in California when the law passed.

A Qatari man has died in a British hospital from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus which has been causing increasing alarm among world health experts, officials said Thursday.

The death brings to 43 the number of people to date who have died from the SARS-like infection, which has an extremely high mortality rate.

Human Rights Watch on Thursday called on the Greek government to repeal a regulation forcing suspected sex workers and other groups to undergo HIV testing, reintroduced last week by the country's newly appointed health minister.

"It's deeply worrying that it took the new health minister only one day to bring back a regulation that violated human rights and stigmatized vulnerable groups, and that proved counterproductive to protecting public health," Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher at the New York-based rights group, said in a statement.

In a third-floor room of a London hospital with orange and white walls draped with Tibetan prayer flags, roughly a dozen people gathered recently to perform vocal exercises and sing songs, including folk music from Ghana and Polynesia.

While the participants were drawn to the session by a fondness for music, they also had an ulterior motive for singing: to cope better with lung disease. The weekly group is led by a professional musician and is offered to people with respiratory problems including asthma, emphysema, and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder, or COPD.