An outbreak of swine flu has claimed 57 lives since mid-November in Iran, where hundreds of people have been diagnosed with the virus, the health ministry said Tuesday.

"Around 900 patients have been diagnosed with the H1N1 flue virus across the country," the head of the ministry's communicable diseases department, Mohammad Mehdi, told Agence France Presse.

"If I'd known, I'd never have taken this pill," says Felicitas Rohrer, who is suing German pharmaceuticals giant Bayer, claiming its oral contraceptive Yasminelle caused her to suffer a pulmonary embolism.

The accusations against Bayer's contraceptive pills Yasminelle and Yaz, based on drospirenone, are not new and the company has already paid out nearly two billion dollars (1.8 billion euros) to around 10,000 women in out-of-court settlements in the United States to avoid long and costly trials.

Guatemala is considering compensation for the family of three people who were victims of a 1940s U.S.-led medical experiment in which hundreds were infected with syphilis, Vice President Alfonso Fuentes said Monday.

"They have been heard and what they are asking for is some form of damages," Fuentes told reporters, adding that the government was studying the option of providing "financial and moral" reparation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin walks with a curious "gunslinger's gait" -- a reduced swing in his right arm which he may have acquired through KGB weapons training, an unusual study published Monday said.

The research, published in the British medical journal The BMJ, was written by a team of neurologists in Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands.

When her legs ache, this Mexican grandmother rubs them with marijuana-infused alcohol. She is well aware the homemade remedy defies the country's cannabis ban, but her family has used the concoction to treat ailments since she was a child, handing it down the generations.

"I really have a lot of faith in it," said the slender 53-year-old, a housewife and amateur dancer who spoke to AFP about her cannabis use on condition of strict anonymity.

An outbreak of swine flu in Iran has claimed 42 lives since mid-November, including in a province neighboring Tehran, Health Minister Hassan Hashemi said Thursday.

Hashemi, quoted by ISNA news agency, said 33 deaths from the H1N1 virus were recorded in Kerman and five in Sistan-Baluchistan, both provinces in southeastern Iran.

Justin Trudeau raised eyebrows when he admitted to having dabbled in marijuana while a member of parliament, but his pledge as prime minister to legalize pot has been broadly cheered.

He said in a policy speech on Friday that his Liberal government would introduce legislation as early as 2016 to legalize marijuana, making Canada the first in the G7 bloc of industrialized nations to do so, although precise details remain sketchy.

Men taking a treatment for prostate cancer known as androgen deprivation therapy may be almost twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than men not taking ADT, a study has found.

While the research in the December 7 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology stopped short of showing any definitive cause-and-effect between ADT and Alzheimer's, scientists said the association raises concern and merits further study.

Nearly one third of young doctors in training suffer from depression, according to a U.S. study Tuesday that warned the phenomenon may have negative effects on health care.

The analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association included more than 17,000 physicians in training, going back as far as 1963.

Children born to mothers with a hormonal imbalance run a much higher risk of developing autism, according to a new study released by Sweden's Karolinska Institutet on Tuesday.

The findings, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, link an imbalance called polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children.