Morocco is seeing an alarming rise in the number of babies abandoned by single mothers, activists said on Saturday, blaming social prejudice and outdated legislation for the problem.

"According to the information we have gathered, from people who take care of abandoned children born outside marriage, the numbers are getting much worse," said Omar Kindi, organiser of a conference on violence and discrimination against single mothers and children.

The Dutch public health watchdog says at least one elderly patient has died and more than 500 people have been sickened in a major salmonella outbreak caused by tainted salmon.

The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment said in a statement Saturday tests have confirmed one death and another fatality is under investigation. Both victims were aged over 80.

A U.S. beverage industry group and other businesses filed a lawsuit Friday against the administration of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg seeking to block restrictions on sales of large soda drinks.

Plaintiffs led by the American Beverage Association and the National Restaurant Association took the city to court over the limited ban, which is due to take effect in March.

 The deadly meningitis outbreak linked to contaminated pain injections has prompted calls for tighter federal regulation of compounding pharmacies, which have periodically been blamed for crippling and sometimes fatal injuries. But this isn't the first time Congress has pushed for more authority over the industry.

Such efforts stretch back to the 1990s, and after vigorous pushback by compounding pharmacists, they have left a patchwork of incomplete, overlapping laws, contradictory court rulings and overall uncertainty about how much power the Food and Drug Administration has to regulate compounders.

About 50 non-governmental organisations on Friday urged the French-speaking nations holding a summit in Kinshasa at the weekend to "make concrete commitments" to fight AIDS in Africa.

"This 14th summit of the Francophonie (group of mainly former French colonies) should be an opportunity for governments of Francophone countries to make concrete commitments in the face of an epidemic that continues to devastate whole societies and undermine development," the NGOs wrote in an open joint letter.

The death toll from a deadly meningitis outbreak in the United States blamed on a tainted drug rose to 14 Thursday as the number of cases jumped to 172 in 11 states, health officials said.

That's up from 12 deaths and 137 cases on Wednesday.

The number of girls who marry before their 18th birthday could increase dramatically over the next two decades, a new U.N. report warned Thursday.

If current trends continue, the tally of such unions will rise to 14.2 million a year in 2020, and 15.1 million each year in 2030, according to the report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Take this with a grain of salt, or perhaps some almonds or hazelnuts: A study ties chocolate consumption to the number of Nobel Prize winners a country has and suggests it's a sign that the sweet treat can boost brain power.

No, this does not appear in the satirical Onion newspaper. It's in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, which published it online Wednesday as a "note" rather than a rigorous, peer-reviewed study.

It sounds like a scene from a TV show: Someone sends a discarded coffee cup to a laboratory where the unwitting drinker's DNA is decoded, predicting what diseases lurk in his or her future.

A presidential commission found that's legally possible in about half the states — and says new protections to ensure the privacy of people's genetic information are critical if the nation is to realize the enormous medical potential of gene-mapping.

Dengue has spread in Portugal's Madeira archipelago since it appeared last week and there are now 18 confirmed cases, health officials said Wednesday.

Another 191 people are suspected of having contracted the virus which is spread by mosquito bites.