Iraq's health ministry said Wednesday it had found its first suspected polio case in 14 years, which could have originated in neighboring Syria where confirmed cases have sparked a region-wide alert.

The suspected case was found in a young boy in Bab al-Sham near Baghdad, ministry spokesman Ziad Tariq told Agence France Presse.

Guinea battled Wednesday to contain an Ebola epidemic threatening neighboring countries as fear and confusion gripped communities under siege from one of the deadliest viruses known to mankind.

Global aid organisations have sent dozens of workers to help the poverty-hit west African nation combat the haemorrhagic fever, with health officials raising the death toll by two to 63.

Hundreds of dead pigs are being recovered every month from a Chinese reservoir, partly due to government efforts to stop carcasses making their way onto the dining table, state media said Wednesday.

The revelations about the reservoir in Qionglai, in the southwestern province of Sichuan, are the latest scandal relating to food safety to hit China.

The South Korean capital Seoul is to restrict the use of plastic surgery adverts on public transport, officials said Wednesday, after complaints that they were fueling an unhealthy obsession with body image.

South Korea, and particularly Seoul, has an international reputation for plastic surgery, and adverts featuring famous surgeons and giant before-and-after photos are omnipresent -- on street billboards, subway trains, bus stops and the backs of bus seats.

Youths who play video games are more likely to think and act in aggressive ways, suggested a study out Monday of more than 3,000 schoolchildren in Singapore.

The research, published in JAMA Pediatrics, a journal of the American Medical Association, was based on more than 3,034 children who were studied over the course of three years.

People who use electronic cigarettes do not report higher rates of quitting than regular cigarette smokers, according to a U.S. study out Monday.

The findings were based on survey answers from 949 smokers, reported in a research letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine.

Lower back pain causes more disability around the world than any other single condition, and accounts for a third of work-related handicaps, a specialist journal reported on Monday.

Nearly a tenth -- 9.4 percent -- of the world's population has lower back pain, with the prevalence highest in Western Europe, followed by North Africa and the Middle East, and the lowest in the Caribbean and Latin America, a study found. The figure includes children.

Air pollution kills about 7 million people worldwide every year, with more than half of the fatalities due to fumes from indoor stoves, according to a new report from the World Health Organization published Tuesday.

The agency said air pollution is the cause of about one in eight deaths and has now become the single biggest environmental health risk.

Guinea announced on Monday that samples taken from three suspected cases of Ebola, which led to two deaths in the capital Conakry, had tested negative for the virus.

"The Pasteur Institute in Dakar worked urgently all last night on samples taken from suspected cases here in Conakry which were all negative," said Sakoba Keita, the health ministry's chief disease prevention officer.

The Obama administration and its opponents are renewing the Supreme Court battle over President Barack Obama's health care law in a case that pits the religious rights of employers against the rights of women to the birth control of their choice.

Two years after the entire law survived the justices' review by a single vote, the court is hearing arguments Tuesday in a religion-based challenge from family-owned companies that object to covering certain contraceptives in their health plans as part of the law's preventive care requirement.