A non-profit group said Friday it was launching a project to comb the catalogues of some of Japan's biggest drug companies in the hunt for treatments for diseases that kill thousands of people every year.

The Global Health Innovative Technology Fund (GHIT Fund), set up by the Japanese government, Japanese pharma companies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said they were looking at a potential five-year commitment of more than $100 million to support research and development into neglected diseases.

Japan has suspended imports of some U.S. wheat after genetically engineered crops were found on an Oregon farm, a government official said Friday.

Tokyo's move came as the European Union told its member states to test imports from the area, saying any genetically modified wheat would not be sold to consumers.

Singapore is bracing itself for its worst ever dengue epidemic with infections this year already exceeding the total for all of 2012, official statistics showed Friday.

The first fatality of the year, a 20-year-old man, died on Wednesday in the city-state, which is known for fastidious sanitation but is facing a spike in the breeding of the Aedes mosquito that transmits the disease.

Nestle SA, the world's biggest food and drink company, says it is boosting research to tackle the threat of ever-stronger strains of bacteria and germs in food manufacturing.

The Vevey, Switzerland-based company says it will initially boost research into several types of food-borne bacteria — particularly a dangerous strain of bacterium E. coli that infects people and pumps out a poison called Shiga toxin — and viruses Norovirus and Hepatitis A.

A young man lived for many years with a pencil lodged inside his head, said German surgeons who detected the object on a CT scan and safely removed it.

The patient, a 24-year-old man from Afghanistan, had complained of impaired vision in his right eye, headaches and a discharge from his right nostril.

Studies on lab animals have shown early success in a type of gene therapy that may prevent the spread of pandemic flu, including historic lethal strains from 1918 and 2009, researchers said Wednesday.

The method developed at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine delivered a broadly neutralizing flu antibody into the nasal passages of ferrets and mice, protecting them against potentially lethal flu.

A policy of regularly washing every patient in the intensive care unit with antimicrobial cloths helped cut down on dangerous blood infections by 44 percent, a U.S. study said Wednesday.

The strategy was better at cutting back potentially lethal methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections than screening and isolating infected patients, said the report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

High doses of some commonly used pain drugs like ibuprofen can increase heart attacks, strokes and related deaths by about a third, a study warned on Thursday.

The drugs, known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), are widely used to manage pain caused by inflammatory disorders.

The global death toll from a SARS-like virus has risen to 27, the World Health Organization said Wednesday after three patients died in hard-hit Saudi Arabia and another in France.

The new virus was last week renamed the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, or MERS, reflecting the fact that the bulk of cases are in that region.

People who undergo weekend non-emergency surgery in English public hospitals have an 82 percent higher chance of dying within a month than those treated on a Monday, research shows.

The odds stacked up for every successive day of the week, with the death risk from Friday surgery 44 percent higher than Monday, said a study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).