Two-thirds of high-street garments tested in a study by Greenpeace contained potentially harmful chemicals, the group said Tuesday, highlighting the findings with a "toxic" fashion show in Beijing.

The environmental campaign group is pushing for fashion brands to commit to "zero discharge of all hazardous chemicals" by 2020 and to require suppliers to publicise any toxic chemicals they release into the environment.

Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi has been appointed an ambassador of the U.N.'s program on HIV and AIDS and has been tasked with fighting discrimination against people living with the disease, the agency said Tuesday.

“It is a great honor to be chosen as a champion for people who live on the fringes of society and struggle every day to maintain their dignity and basic human rights," the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said in a statement.

The Philippines has moved closer to raising tobacco and alcohol taxes, the government said Wednesday after the Senate passed a bill aimed at weaning millions of smokers off the habit.

The Senate late Tuesday passed a bill that would raise 40 billion pesos (nearly $1 billion) in "sin taxes" each year, Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima said in a statement.

Twenty-five countries, many in hard-hit Africa, have at least halved new HIV infections in the past decade, with particular progress made toward protecting children from the deadly virus, the United Nations said Tuesday.

"It is becoming evident that achieving zero new HIV infections in children is possible," Michel Sidibe, the executive director of UNAIDS, said in a statement.

There's a new push to make testing for the AIDS virus as common as cholesterol checks.

An independent panel that sets screening guidelines is proposing that Americans ages 15 to 64 get an HIV test at least once — not just people considered at high risk for the virus.

Unemployment hurts more than your wallet — it may damage your heart. That's according to a study linking joblessness with heart attacks in older American workers.

The increased odds weren't huge, although multiple job losses posed as big a threat as smoking, high blood pressure and other conditions that are bad for the heart.

Canada's federal government allowed the approval process to proceed Monday for the generic form of the highly-addictive painkiller OxyContin, a move that set off a quick outcry from the country's provinces and aboriginal communities.

Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq rejected a plea from Canada's provinces, which unanimously requested a delay of approval until regulators could examine the abuse of oxycodone. Ontario asked for a complete ban on the drug, which has caused widespread addictions in Canada's rural and tribal communities.

A novel strain of the deadly SARS virus that sparked a health scare this year is closely related to a virus found in Asian bats, according to a study published on Tuesday.

Scientists in the Netherlands said they had sequenced the genetic code of a viral sample taken from a 60-year-old man whose death in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in June triggered fears that Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was returning in a new guise.

The United Nations says that Sudan has launched a massive vaccination campaign to immunize 2.4 million people against an outbreak of yellow fever in the restive region of Darfur.

The Monday statement from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says Khartoum's Health Ministry received an initial shipment of 800,000 doses of vaccine on Friday.

People living in the tropics are likely to die more than seven years younger than those in other regions, according to the first findings of a global research project released Monday.

The "State of the Tropics" study, run by 13 institutions across 12 countries, reported that people living in the world's tropical zones in 2010 had an average life expectancy of 64.4 years.