Cases of dengue fever are on the rise in Sao Paulo, with a nearly eightfold increase that saw 24 people die in Brazil's most populous state so far this year, the health ministry said Friday.

The mosquito-borne infectious tropical disease comes as Sao Paulo state and the southeast of the country suffer water shortages in the wake of the worst, months-long drought in living memory.

The MERS virus has killed 10 more people in Saudi Arabia over the past week, pushing the death toll above 400, as health officials broaden their campaign to halt its spread.

Saudi Arabia is the country worst-hit by Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).

In an encouraging development for consumers worried about antibiotics in their milk, a new Food and Drug Administration study showed little evidence of drug contamination after surveying almost 2,000 dairy farms.

In response to concerns, the agency in 2012 took samples of raw milk from the farms and tested them for 31 drugs, almost all of them antibiotics. Results released by the agency Thursday show that less than 1 percent of the total samples showed illegal drug residue.

Human exposure to hormone disrupting chemicals could cost the European Union some 157 billion euros a year in health care and lost productivity, according to a study published Thursday in a scientific journal.

The study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism linked endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) to IQ loss, autism, attention hyperactivity disorder, obesity, testicular cancer and male infertility.

Zully Broussard thought she was going to help one person by donating a kidney.

Instead, she helped six.

Men tend to be more narcissistic than women and as a result are more likely to exploit others, a U.S. study said Thursday after analyzing three decades of data from more than 475,000 people.

The findings were consistent across multiple age groups and generations, said the University at Buffalo School of Management, pointing out that narcissism has good and bad points.

David Mitchell remembers the day he read the memoir of a 13-year-old boy with autism -- hailing it a "revelatory godsend" that offered a window on the life of his own autistic son.

The best-selling author of "Cloud Atlas" said Naoki Higashida was "one of the most helpful and practical writers on the subject of autism in the world."

A study conducted over 20 years in the Los Angeles area has shown that the region's improving air quality has led to children having better functioning lungs, researchers said.

The findings, which tracked 2,000 young people from age 11 to 15, were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

People who suffer from gout can take comfort in one thing: they may be less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, researchers said Wednesday.

The same uric acid that can crystallize to cause gout, a form of arthritis, may protect against Alzheimer's, they wrote in the online journal Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.

Marriages are more likely to end in divorce if the wife takes seriously ill, a U.S. study released Wednesday found.

The research, detailed in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, found that divorce was six percent more likely if the wife fell ill, than if she remained in good health.