Gay and transgender rights groups barred from a major U.N. AIDS conference opening Wednesday plan to defy the decision by joining other delegations at the meeting on ending the HIV epidemic.

Twenty-two groups were denied U.N. accreditation to attend the gathering after Russia, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Cameroon and Tanzania raised objections, drawing outrage from AIDS activists.

Hong Kong culled 4,500 birds on Tuesday after the deadly H7N9 bird flu virus was discovered in a chicken at a local market.

Two months before Joe Clark died of colon cancer at age 31, a doctor gently told him it was time to stop treatment.

He had suffered through more than a year of chemotherapy that produced painful sores in his mouth, last-ditch major abdominal surgery had left behind excruciating scar tissue, and hope had dried up. But the end of treatment had a surprise effect on Clark and his wife.

Using a patient's individual tumor biomarkers to determine the best treatment can improve success rates, studies showed Saturday.

Unlike chemotherapy and radiation therapy, targeted medicine allows to preserve healthy cells.

One of India's top hospitals unwittingly removed the kidneys of organ-trafficking victims believing they were donating them to relatives, a hospital spokesman said Saturday, after police arrested five over the racket.

A combination of two chemotherapy drugs has shown promising results in fighting pancreatic cancer, significantly improving five-year survival rates, according to a European study presented Friday.

The trial showed that patients who take the oral drug capecitabine in addition to treatment with the commonly-used intravenous drug gemcitabine after surgical removal of pancreatic cancer survived longer without significant increase in negative side effects.

US authorities said Tuesday they are establishing a network of labs that can respond quickly to antibiotic-resistant "superbugs," following America's first human case of a dangerous strain of E. coli.

The announcement by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came as authorities try to identify people who had contact with a 49-year-old woman in the eastern state of Pennsylvania whose urinary tract infection tested positive for E. coli bacteria carrying the antibiotic-resistant mcr-1 gene.

When Heni Karmila sought to find a doctor for her ailing mother using Indonesia's new healthcare system, she faced a nine-hour wait in a line outside a crowded public hospital in Jakarta.

The World Health Organization's Zika response program is only 13 percent funded, "severely" compromising efforts to combat the virus that is increasingly becoming a global threat, the UN agency said Monday.

But the significant funding gaps in the $17.7-million (15.9-million-euro) plan are not having a major impact on Brazil's efforts to keep the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro safe, WHO spokeswoman Nyka Alexander told AFP.

The pharmaceuticals sector is facing an intensive period of mergers and acquisitions in the coming years, even if U.S. firms Pfizer and Allergan recently failed to tie the knot, the corporate consultancy firm EY said Monday.