New drugs marketed as "legal highs" and "designer drugs" are emerging fast and in great numbers, and authorities are struggling to keep up, a new U.N. report warned Wednesday.

So-called new psychoactive substances (NPS), often sold under harmless names like spice, bath salts or herbal incense, posed a serious health risk although they were legal, the U.N. office on drugs and crimes (UNODC) said in its annual World Drug Report.

U.S. authorities on Tuesday urged all adults born between 1945 and 1965 to get tested for hepatitis C, saying millions of Americans are unaware that they are infected with the liver disease.

The so-called baby boom generation accounts for three out of four people with hepatitis C, according to Albert Siu, co-chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

Hundreds of thousands of women at high risk of developing breast cancer in Britain should be given drugs which could dramatically reduce their chances of getting the disease, doctors were advised Tuesday.

In guidelines issued by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), up to half-a-million women with a family history of the illness should receive the £120 ($185, 141 euros), five-year course of tamoxifen or raloxifene.

New York officials on Monday urged people who may have been affected by the 9/11 attacks to apply for economic benefits before an October deadline.

U.S. Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler joined community leaders, labor officials and emergency workers for the start of a campaign to publicize the available compensation.

Doctors are reporting a major step toward an "artificial pancreas," a device that would constantly monitor blood sugar in people with diabetes and automatically supply insulin as needed.

A key component of such a system — an insulin pump programmed to shut down if blood-sugar dips too low while people are sleeping — worked as intended in a three-month study of 247 patients.

People breastfed as infants have a 24 percent better chance than their formula-fed counterparts of climbing the social ladder, said a study Tuesday.

Conversely, being fed mothers' milk as a baby also reduced one's chances of social demotion later in life by as much as 20 percent, said the findings published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.

A Saudi man has died from the MERS virus, bringing the kingdom's death toll from the SARS-like infection to 34, the ministry of health said on Monday.

The ministry said on its website that new cases had also been recorded, especially in Eastern Province where most of the infections have occurred.

Traditional Chinese herbs are being contaminated with a toxic cocktail of pesticides that poses a threat to consumer health and the environment, campaign group Greenpeace said Monday.

Some residue levels were hundreds of times higher than European Union food safety standards, according to tests carried out for a Greenpeace report "Chinese herbs: elixir of health or pesticides cocktail?", the latest to focus on the harmful effects of China's large-scale farming industry.

The H7N9 bird flu that hit China this year killed over a third of hospitalized patients, said researchers Monday who labeled the virus "less serious" but probably more widespread than previously thought.

They warned watchdogs not to take comfort from a lull in new infections, as the virus may reappear in the autumn.

An elderly Saudi man has died from the MERS virus, bringing the kingdom's death toll from the SARS-like infection to 33, the health ministry said.

The 81-year-old man died in Eastern Province, where most cases of coronavirus have been registered, the ministry said on its website late Friday.