A foreigner who flew to the Philippines from the Middle East has become the second confirmed case of MERS in the country, the health department said Monday, as a deadly outbreak in South Korea spreads alarm across Asia.

The 36-year-old male patient, whose nationality was not disclosed, has been put in isolation at a government facility to contain the virus, Health Secretary Janette Garin said.

A 36-year-old foreigner who arrived in the Philippines from the Middle East is under quarantine after testing positive for the MERS virus, health officials said Monday.

Philippine Health Secretary Janette Garin said several people the foreigner had come in close contact with have been traced. She said one of them, a Filipino woman exhibiting mild symptoms, had been isolated and that her test results were being awaited.

Traditional circumcision ceremonies in South Africa's Eastern Cape province, where the rite-of-passage practice is common, have left 14 boys dead and 141 injured this year, local authorities said Sunday. 

Many of the injured teens suffered from "dehydration, wounds, pneumonia, aseptic penis and gangrene" Sizwe Kupelo, spokesman for the health ministry in the Eastern Cape province told AFP. 

Dr. Gustavo Quintana walks out of a modest, two-floor apartment building in southern Bogota. Inside his black doctor's bag are vials containing anesthesia and muscle relaxants, a syringe and a rubber tourniquet. The man known in Colombia as Dr. Death has just ended the life of his 234th patient: a middle-aged woman suffering from incurable stomach cancer.

For years, Quintana and a handful of other physicians have been performing what they consider mercy killings in a semi-clandestine state, at risk of prosecution and amid widespread rejection from other doctors and church officials.

Mourdja's nose has been eaten away, like one lip and part of her upper gum, leaving the 13-year-old girl atrociously disfigured by noma, a disease that thrives on malnutrition.

"It was better before," the teenager says shyly and simply in the arid heartland of Niger, one of the world's poorest nations, clearly ill at ease and fiddling with her bracelets.

Eight people have died and scores more have been wounded in a crackdown in Kenya on illegally brewed alcohol, reports and officials said Saturday.

Hundreds of people have also been arrested, business premises destroyed and thousands of liters destroyed in the operation, sparked by government concern over rising alcoholism and a recent spate of deaths linked to illicit drinks.

Tests have ruled out the potentially fatal MERS virus in a Czech tour guide hospitalized in Prague, the health minister said Friday.

"Based on laboratory tests on the patient... I can definitely confirm the disease was not MERS," Svatopluk Nemecek told reporters without elaborating.

At least 29 people have died in a cholera outbreak in war-torn South Sudan with thousands more at risk of infection, the United Nations said Friday.

A total of 484 cholera cases, including 29 deaths -- six of them children under five -- had been reported by the end of June, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) said.

Doctors who gave children with cystic fibrosis a replacement copy of a defective gene say it appeared to slow the expected decline of some patients' lungs, but called the results "modest" and say there must be major improvements before offering the treatment more widely.

Cystic fibrosis is an inherited condition that fills the lungs with mucus, making people susceptible to infections that can eventually destroy the lungs; the average life expectancy is about 37 years. After scientists identified the genetic sequence that causes cystic fibrosis in 1989, many experts hoped the disease could be cured by replacing the problem gene. But before the new study, all attempts at such gene therapy — where a normal version of the faulty gene is given to patients — failed to show a benefit.

Health authorities on Thursday announced the first U.S. death from measles in 12 years, after an autopsy showed a woman's fatal pneumonia was caused by the contagious disease.

"The cause of death was pneumonia due to measles," said a statement from the Department of Health in Clallam County, Washington.