A Frenchman deemed too fat too fly has finally secured a plane ticket back to Europe after an alternate plan to return by ship fell through, his father said Monday.

Kevin Chenais -- who has a hormone imbalance and came to the United States for treatment -- is due to take an evening Virgin flight from New York to London with his parents, Rene Chenais told Agence France Presse.

For more than 30 years, Indonesian dentist Edi Herman has been fixing the teeth of Jakartans in the rusty chair of his tiny shop, advertising his services with a huge poster of sparkling pearly whites on blood-red gums.

He is one of thousands of low-cost, unlicensed dentists, whose small stores with their lurid signs can be found nestling in grimy alleys and wedged between red-tiled houses across the capital.

An Indonesian woman living near the capital Jakarta has died of bird flu, the health ministry said, the latest death from H5N1 in the country hardest hit by the virus.

The 31-year-old housewife from Bekasi in West Java province is the 163rd fatality from the virus in Southeast Asia's biggest nation, the ministry said in a statement seen Monday.

Turkey on Monday announced a mass vaccination campaign against an outbreak of polio in areas near neighboring Syria.

"We are planning to vaccinate about one million children under five years old," public health agency vice president Mehmet Ali Torunoglu told private NTV television.

A common type of malaria that used to be powerless to infect certain groups of Africans is becoming more potent, putting tens of millions of people at risk, scientists said Friday.

Caused by a mosquito-borne parasite called Plasmodium vivax, the infection is rarely fatal but can lay dormant in the liver and cause chronic recurrences if left untreated.

Thirty-nine House Democrats defected Friday to vote for legislation that would gut significant portions of the new U.S. health care law, the strongest sign yet of party anger over "Obamacare."

Should the Democrat-run Senate approve the measure, which would allow insurers to offer policies that do not meet requirements of the new health care reforms, the White House has said President Barack Obama would veto it.

Alba Diaz runs a special kind of hotel. Her guests are foreigners seeking plastic surgery in a Colombian city that's become a magnet for folks looking for a nip and tuck.

Working in a posh neighborhood of Cali, Colombia's third largest city, the 55-year-old Diaz pampers her clients, from the time they get off the plane throughout their stay at her clinic.

Mahmud Zubairu scrutinizes the computer screen in front of him, watching the progress of healthcare workers as they fan out across Nigeria's northern Kano state where polio runs high.

The dozens of teams are going door-to-door to immunize every child aged under-five, as part of an aggressive push to eradicate the debilitating disease.

A French court on Thursday found German safety standards firm TUV liable in a global scare over defective breast implants and ordered the company to compensate distributors and victims.

The court in the southern city of Toulon ruled that TUV Rheinland had "neglected its duties of checking and vigilance" after having certified that implants made by Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) conformed to European safety rules -- even though they were subsequently found to have been made of substandard, industrial-grade silicone gel.

British gynaecologists warned on Friday that increasing numbers of teenage girls and women are undergoing genital cosmetic surgery, driven in part by unrealistic images of how they should look based on pornography.

The state-funded National Health Service (NHS) performed more than 2,000 labial reduction procedures -- labiaplasties -- in 2010, a five-fold increase in ten years, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG).