China's legislature on Friday passed a long-awaited mental health law that aims to prevent people from being involuntarily held and unnecessarily treated in psychiatric facilities — abuses that have been used against government critics and triggered public outrage.

The law standardizes mental health care services, requiring general hospitals to set up special outpatient clinics or provide counseling, and calls for the training of more doctors.

An unprecedented crackdown in 16 African countries netted 82 million doses of illegal or counterfeit drugs, including antibiotics, contraceptives and malaria treatments, the World Customs Organization (WCO) said on Thursday.

The operation, called Vice Grips 2, was carried out by customs inspectors in 16 ports from July 11 to 20, it said.

Germany became the fourth country Thursday to ban sales of flu vaccines made by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, following embargoes by Italy, Switzerland and Austria.

Announcing the latest ban, German health authorities said four batches of the Begripal flu vaccine -- also marketed as Agrippal -- and one batch of the Fluad vaccine were no longer for sale.

Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis insisted early Thursday that its flu vaccines were safe despite a sales ban by Italy, Switzerland and Austria.

"Novartis confirms its confidence in the safety and efficacy of its seasonal influenza vaccines Agrippal and Fluad," the company said in a statement released overnight.

Scientists on Wednesday reported that, in pioneering experiments on human eggs, they had replaced a genetic mechanism blamed for crippling diseases.

The laboratory breakthrough could one day lead to human trials to avert so-called mitochondrial disorders, they said.

Aspirin, one of the world's oldest and cheapest drugs, has shown remarkable promise in treating colon cancer in people with mutations in a gene that's thought to play a role in the disease.

Among patients with the mutations, those who regularly took aspirin lived longer than those who didn't, a major study found. Five years after their cancers were diagnosed, 97 percent of the aspirin users were still alive versus 74 percent of those not taking the drug.

U.S. officials revoked the license Wednesday of a Massachusetts pharmacy cited for significant sanitary violations as the toll from a meningitis outbreak tied to its tainted drugs rose to 24.

The New England Compounding Center voluntarily shut down operations and recalled all of its products in the wake of the unprecedented outbreak.

Working mothers may have to juggle more tasks than their husbands, but the long-held belief that women are better than men at multitasking is a myth, according to new Swedish research.

"On the contrary, the results of our study show that men are better at multitasking than women," Timo Maentylae, a psychology professor at Stockholm University, said.

An outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo has stabilized, with no new deaths or cases in more than a week, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

For the past 10 days, the death toll from the haemorraghic fever has remained at 36 and no new cases have been registered, the WHO said in a bulletin. The last case of hospitalization dates back to October 11, according to the statement released to the press on Tuesday.

A Chinese city is set to ban minors from having cosmetic surgery under draft rules aimed at tackling the country's growing obsession with going under the knife, an official statement said.

The rules for Guangzhou city have been drawn up as concerns grow about the dangers of plastic surgery in a country where three million people have operations each year to change their appearances, according to state media.