Doctors are reporting a major step toward an "artificial pancreas," a device that would constantly monitor blood sugar in people with diabetes and automatically supply insulin as needed.

A key component of such a system — an insulin pump programmed to shut down if blood-sugar dips too low while people are sleeping — worked as intended in a three-month study of 247 patients.

People breastfed as infants have a 24 percent better chance than their formula-fed counterparts of climbing the social ladder, said a study Tuesday.

Conversely, being fed mothers' milk as a baby also reduced one's chances of social demotion later in life by as much as 20 percent, said the findings published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.

A Saudi man has died from the MERS virus, bringing the kingdom's death toll from the SARS-like infection to 34, the ministry of health said on Monday.

The ministry said on its website that new cases had also been recorded, especially in Eastern Province where most of the infections have occurred.

Traditional Chinese herbs are being contaminated with a toxic cocktail of pesticides that poses a threat to consumer health and the environment, campaign group Greenpeace said Monday.

Some residue levels were hundreds of times higher than European Union food safety standards, according to tests carried out for a Greenpeace report "Chinese herbs: elixir of health or pesticides cocktail?", the latest to focus on the harmful effects of China's large-scale farming industry.

The H7N9 bird flu that hit China this year killed over a third of hospitalized patients, said researchers Monday who labeled the virus "less serious" but probably more widespread than previously thought.

They warned watchdogs not to take comfort from a lull in new infections, as the virus may reappear in the autumn.

An elderly Saudi man has died from the MERS virus, bringing the kingdom's death toll from the SARS-like infection to 33, the health ministry said.

The 81-year-old man died in Eastern Province, where most cases of coronavirus have been registered, the ministry said on its website late Friday.

A leading U.S. doctors' group this week urged the reversal of a decades-old ban on donations of blood from gay men, saying the law is discriminatory and outdated.

The policy decision came Tuesday in Chicago at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association, a professional grouping of more than 800,000 doctors.

Belgian lawmakers on Thursday moved closer to legalising the euthanasia of minors, so long as they are judged capable of deciding for themselves.

Four senators from parties in the governing coalition formally put forward changes to a 2002 law that made Belgium the second country in the world after The Netherlands to legalise mercy killing in certain cases.

In the first major global review of violence against women, a series of reports released Thursday found that about a third of women have been physically or sexually assaulted by a former or current partner.

The head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Margaret Chan, called it "a global health problem of epidemic proportions," and other experts said screening for domestic violence should be added to all levels of health care.

The deadly MERS coronavirus which has emerged in Saudi Arabia poses a threat to hospitals because it spreads rapidly and carries a high mortality rate, according to a study out Thursday.

An international team of researchers studied 23 cases at four hospitals in Saudi Arabia, which included 15 fatalities, a mortality rate of 65 percent, the New England Journal of Medicine reported.