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).

Researchers in China said Wednesday a trial vaccine provided "significant" protection against a virus that can cause potentially deadly hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) in children.

In the final testing phase, the vaccine proved 90 percent effective, providing protection for at least 12 months against HFMD caused by the enterovirus 71 (EV71), said a study published in The Lancet.

Alarmed at expanding waistlines around the world, the U.N.'s health agency has urged countries to get serious about reining in a ballooning obesity crisis, proposing an action plan that includes taxing unhealthy snacks and rules against marketing junk food to children.

Once considered only a problem in high-income countries like the United States, where nearly 70 percent of the adult population is overweight, obesity is now growing fastest in developing nations in Africa and Latin America, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent battling extreme poverty and disease since 2000 and now the United Nations is lining up a new war on the social distress still suffered by huge numbers around the world.

Ideas on targets to follow the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and how to pay will be in a report to be handed over by Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on Thursday to U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon.

The Saudi health ministry said on Tuesday it has recorded five new cases of a deadly SARS-like virus in the east of the oil-rich kingdom.

It identified those affected as elderly people aged between 73 and 85 who had been grappling with chronic illnesses.

France's first victim of a SARS-like virus which the 65-year-old man is thought to have contracted in Dubai, has died, health officials said Tuesday.

"The first patient is dead," a spokesman with the Directorate General for Health said, referring to the man who was hospitalized on April 23.

Laboratory tests have confirmed resistance in three H7N9 bird flu patients to a common group of antiviral drugs including Tamiflu, said a study published by The Lancet on Tuesday.

The "apparent ease" with which resistance emerged in H7N9 viruses to the only available treatment is a cause for concern, said the Chinese researchers who conducted the study.

New synthetic psychoactive substances are making their way into Europe where the Internet is becoming a big challenge in the fight against illicit drugs, the continent's drug agency warned Tuesday.

Drug use in Europe remains high even though the consumption of cannabis and cocaine appears to be slowing, as is new heroin use, the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) said in its annual report.