Women who had the flu or ran a fever for more than a week during their pregnancy face a greater risk of having a child with an autism spectrum disorder, Danish researchers said Monday.

The study was based on a survey of mothers of nearly 97,000 children aged eight to 14 and born between 1997 and 2003 in Denmark. Only one percent (976) of the children were diagnosed with autism.

Malaysia'a official Palm Oil Council on Monday slammed as "irresponsible" and "badly informed" a French senator's call to slap a 300-percent tax increase on palm oil, known in France as a "Nutella tax" after a popular brand of spread.

"The proposal is based on inaccurate claims that palm oil is bad for health and nutrition, and that Malaysia does not respect the environment," the council said in a statement received here.

The group Doctors Without Borders has aided victims of war and disease in countries like Sudan, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Now, they are on their first mission in the United States -- helping victims of Sandy, the megastorm that brought historic destruction to the New York metropolitan area.

Twenty percent of young people born with HIV in the United States don't know they're infected when they have sex for the first time, according to a new study released Friday.

The study, which appeared in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal, also found that most of the juveniles who were aware of their status said they did not tell their partners before becoming intimate.

About $38 million dollars (30 million euros) is needed to help over two million people made homeless by deadly floods that have ravaged Nigeria since July, the U.N. humanitarian agency said Friday.

"The humanitarian community in Nigeria has presented a response plan for $38 million to respond to the humanitarian needs after the severe flooding in Nigeria in recent weeks," OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke told reporters in Geneva.

The U.N.'s refugee agency warned Friday that an outbreak of hepatitis E among refugees in South Sudan was worsening and that it did not have the needed funds to contain it.

"With funding depleted for our operations in South Sudan, UNHCR is warning today that the capacity to contain an outbreak of hepatitis E among the refugee population is increasingly stretched," agency spokesman Adrian Edwards lamented to reporters in Geneva.

San Francisco is preparing to become the first U.S. city to provide and cover the cost of sex reassignment surgeries for uninsured transgender residents.

The city's Health Commission voted Tuesday to create a comprehensive program for treating transgender people experiencing mental distress because of the mismatch between their bodies and their gender identities. San Francisco already provides transgender residents with hormones, counseling and routine health services, but has stopped short of offering surgical interventions, Public Health Director Barbara Garcia said Thursday after the vote was announced.

An experimental malaria vaccine once thought promising is turning out to be a disappointment, with a new study showing it is only about 30 percent effective at protecting infants from the killer disease.

That is a significant drop from a study last year done in slightly older children, which suggested the vaccine cut the malaria risk by about half — though that is still far below the protection provided from most vaccines. According to details released on Friday, the three-shot regimen reduced malaria cases by about 30 percent in infants aged 6 to 12 weeks, the target age for immunization.

Surgeons at a Philadelphia hospital have successfully completed operations to separate 8-month-old twin girls who were joined at the lower chest and abdomen.

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia says the seven-hour procedures to separate Allison and Amelia Tucker were completed Wednesday afternoon.

Performance-boosting drugs, powered prostheses and wearable computers are coming to an office near you — but experts warned in a new report Wednesday that too little thought has been given to the implications of a superhuman workplace.

Academics from Britain's leading institutions say attention needs to be focused on the consequences of technology which may one day allow — or compel — humans to work better, longer and harder. Here's their list of upgrades that might make their way to campuses and cubicles in the next decade: