French police made 21 arrests Monday as part of an investigation into claims that meat from horses used for drugs testing found its way into the food chain.

The arrests were made at various locations in the south of France following a tip-off that hundreds of horses, including some that had been owned by pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, were sold to abattoirs after their veterinary papers were falsified, a police source told Agence France Presse.

A novel way to speed the testing of cancer drugs and quickly separate winners from duds has yielded its first big result: an experimental medicine that shows promise against a hard-to-treat form of breast cancer.

The method involves studying drugs in small groups of people and using advanced statistical techniques to analyze the results as they come in, instead of waiting for all the data to arrive.

Having previously lost two babies to diarrhoea and dysentery, 25-year-old Suman Chandel lies on a bed in a clinic in remote northern India and smiles with relief.

Hours earlier, Chandel gave birth to her fourth child, a seemingly healthy baby boy weighing three kilograms (six pounds 10 ounces), and is optimistic that this time the chances of survival are good.

A 26-year-old woman disfigured by a tumor has received a new face in Poland's second such transplant.

The woman, identified only as Joanna, had great difficulty chewing, swallowing and talking. Dr. Adam Maciejewski, who led the 23-hour surgery last week, said Thursday he hopes the transplant of some 80 percent of the skin on the woman's face will give her back those functions.

Scientists have long believed that DNA tells the cells how to make proteins. But the discovery of a new, second DNA code Thursday suggests the body speaks two different languages.

The findings in the journal Science may have big implications for how medical experts use the genomes of patients to interpret and diagnose diseases, researchers said.

The number of new cancer cases around the globe jumped by 11 percent in a five-year period, reaching 14.1 million in 2012, with breast cancer increasing by one-fifth, the U.N. health agency said Thursday.

The World Health Organization also reported that cancer deaths had risen by 8.4 percent from 2008 to 2012, hitting 8.2 million.

An outbreak of plague even more vicious than the bubonic strain dubbed the black death has killed 39 people in Madagascar, the government said Thursday.

A government doctor said 90 percent of the cases were pneumonic plague, a strain much more vicious than the common bubonic plague that can kill within three days, leaving little time for antibiotics to work.

A person gets vaccinated against the flu at the Institut Pasteur de Lille research center on October 11, 2013 in Lille, northern France

The flu vaccine prevents the virus more than half the time in children and can also ward off more serious sickness, said the findings of a major clinical trial Wednesday.

One in three children worldwide cannot have their existence legally verified with a birth certificate since their birth was not registered, UNICEF warned Wednesday.

Almost 230 million youngsters under the age of five have no birth certificate, which puts them at a disadvantage for procedural matters and leaves them more vulnerable to abuse.

Having previously lost two babies to diarrhoea and dysentery, 25-year-old Suman Chandel lies on a bed in a clinic in remote northern India and smiles with relief.

Hours earlier, Chandel gave birth to her fourth child, a seemingly healthy baby boy weighing three kilograms, and is optimistic that this time the chances of survival are good.