Saudi health authorities announced on Sunday the death of an elderly woman from the MERS coronavirus, bringing the death toll from the respiratory disease in the kingdom to 61.

The 81-year-old, who died from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in Riyadh, was suffering from several chronic illnesses, the health ministry website said.

The World Health Organization began a campaign on Saturday to prevent outbreaks of cholera in temporary camps in South Sudan housing thousands of people who have fled the country's brutal two-month-old conflict.

The first phase will see around 94,000 people vaccinated against the disease in Minkaman camp in Awerial county, followed by 43,000 in camps around the capital Juba.

One person has died and three newborns have become ill in an outbreak of listeria linked to Hispanic-style cheese.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that the death was in California. Seven additional illnesses were in Maryland.

U.S. regulators are not targeting India, despite a series of import restrictions on drugs from the major U.S. trading partner, the Food and Drug Administration chief said Friday.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg briefed reporters after her first official trip to India, where she met with government and industry leaders earlier this month.

U.S. regulators on Friday banned four types of small cigarettes known as bidis made by an Indian company, marking the Food and Drug Administration's first-ever oversight action against a tobacco product.

Bidis are small, hand-rolled cigarettes that contain tobacco wrapped in leaves from a tendu tree, and may come in various flavors.

Two U.S. states with some of the nation's lowest smoking rates are considering cracking down even more by raising the tobacco age to 21.

Utah and Colorado lawmakers both voted favorably on proposals Thursday to treat tobacco like alcohol and take it away from 18- to 20-year-olds, a move inspired by new research on how many smokers start the habit as teenagers.

A new approach to killing cancer cells that uses a patient's own immune system has beaten back leukemia in 88 percent of adults, U.S. researchers said.

The report by scientists in New York offers more good news for the burgeoning field of cancer immunotherapy, which uses what some describe as a "living drug" that was hailed by Science magazine as the breakthrough of 2013.

The flu is hitting young and middle aged people in the United States particularly hard this season, as a tough flu strain re-emerged and too few people were vaccinated, health authorities said Thursday.

More than 60 percent of all severe flu cases this season in the United States were in people 18-64 years old -- or about double the usual rate, they said.

A dramatic rise in thyroid cancer has resulted from overdiagnosis and treatment of tumors too small to ever cause harm, according to a study that found cases nearly tripled since 1975.

The study is the latest to question whether all cancers need aggressive treatment. Other research has suggested that certain cancers of the prostate, breast and lung as well as thyroid grow so slowly that they will never become deadly, and that overzealous screening leads to overtreatment.

Hundreds of thousands of young women living in impoverished areas of rural Nepal have developed a debilitating uterus condition which usually only occurs after the menopause, Amnesty International said Thursday.

In a report, Amnesty blamed "ingrained discrimination" for the widespread prevalence of uterine prolapse, a condition which sees the uterus descend into and protrude out of the vagina, with many women falling victim after having to return to work in the fields days after giving birth.