Women whose genes put them at a high risk of contracting breast cancer can dramatically reduce the danger by having a double mastectomy -- but not eliminate it altogether, experts say.

The issue has been thrown into the spotlight with Hollywood star Angelina Jolie's announcement that she had her breasts surgically removed after tests revealed she carried a genetic mutation that can lead to cancer.

Indian scientists Tuesday announced a low-cost vaccine against a deadly diarrhoea-causing virus that kills some 100,000 children in the country every year.

Rotavirus, which causes severe diarrhoea, is globally responsible for some 453,000 deaths annually and is particularly dangerous in the developing world where swift health care is often out of reach.

Doctors on Wednesday successfully carried out life-saving surgery on an Indian baby suffering from a rare disorder that caused her head to swell to nearly double its size, a neurosurgeon told Agence France Presse.

"The surgery went perfectly, much better than expected," said Sandeep Vaishya after the procedure on 15-month-old Roona Begum.

The U.S. government wants states to crack down more on people driving under the influence of alcohol by lowering the permitted blood-alcohol limit.

It is now at 0.8 gram of alcohol per liter of blood. The National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday it should come down to 0.5. That would put the U.S. in line with most other countries in the world.

One in ten South Africans is HIV positive but AIDS-related deaths are falling as ramped-up treatment begins to have an impact, the country's official statistics agency said Tuesday.

After years of dragging its heels on the HIV/AIDS crisis, since 2004 South Africa has developed the world's largest HIV treatment program.

The World Health Organization on Tuesday revised up the death toll from the SARS-like coronavirus from 18 to 20 worldwide, but said the two additional fatalities in Saudi Arabia were old cases.

"These are two deaths which are retrospective. They're from an earlier outbreak," WHO spokesman Glenn Thomas told reporters in Geneva, without providing further details.

The amount of salt in foods that are processed or sold at fast food restaurants is still high despite calls by medical experts for people to cut sodium for better health, a U.S. study said Monday.

Americans on average eat more than twice the recommended daily allowance of salt, and as much as 80 percent of sodium consumption comes from salt that is added by restaurants or in the making of convenience foods, experts say.

A single meal at a North American restaurant may contain more than half the calories the average person needs for the whole day, according to research published Monday in a leading U.S. medical journal.

Researchers from the University of Toronto sampled hundreds of meals at 19 chain sit-down restaurants and found that average breakfast, lunch and dinner meals contained 1,128 calories, or 56 percent of the daily 2,000 calorie recommendation.

The U.S. administration filed a last-ditch bid on Monday to delay a court ruling which would allow girls and young women to buy the morning after pill without a prescription.

A U.S. district court ruled last month 5 that a 2011 decision by the chief of U.S. Health and Human Services to require teens under 17 to obtain a prescription was "politically motivated" and "scientifically unjustified."

Legislators in the U.S. state of Vermont approved a "death-with-dignity" bill Monday enabling terminally ill patients to take their own lives with lethal medication requested from their doctors.

The liberal-minded rural New England state becomes the third in the nation, after Oregon and Washington, to allow doctor-assisted suicide -- but the first to do so by legislative process rather than a voter-initiated referendum.