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.

Panic gripped Saudis in the country's east on Monday, where most cases of the deadly coronavirus have been detected, witnesses said, as the death toll from the SARS-like virus in the kingdom hit 15.

Scores of people have reported to the emergency services at hospitals in the city of Al-Ahsa in Eastern Province, after showing even the slightest signs of a fever.

Two respiratory viruses in different parts of the world have captured the attention of global health officials — a novel coronavirus in the Middle East and a new bird flu spreading in China.

Last week, the coronavirus related to SARS spread to France, where one patient who probably caught the disease in Dubai infected his hospital roommate. Officials are now trying to track down everyone who went on a tour group holiday to Dubai with the first patient as well as all contacts of the second patient. Since it was first spotted last year, the new coronavirus has infected 34 people, killing 18 of them. Nearly all had some connection to the Middle East.

He's less than two weeks old, but he has the telltale signs of a baby in pain: a sore on his chin where he's rubbed the skin raw, along with a scratch on his cheek. He suffers from so many tremors that nurses watch him around the clock in case he starts seizing — or stops breathing.

The baby is one of many infants born dependent on drugs. He is being treated at East Tennessee Children's Hospital in Knoxville, where doctors and nurses are on the front lines fighting the nation's prescription drug epidemic. Drug abuse in the state is ranked among the nation's highest, according to some estimates.

Separate studies of the human genome have found tantalising clues to the inherited causes of testicular cancer and non-inherited causes of congenital heart disease, journals reported on Sunday.

University of Pennsylvania researchers looked at the DNA of more than 13,000 men, comparing the DNA code of those with testicular cancer -- the commonest form of cancer diagnosed among young men today -- against men who were otherwise healthy.

Fifteen people in Saudi Arabia have died from a SARS-like virus out of 24 people who contracted it since last August, Health Minister Abdullah al-Rabia said on Sunday.

"The number of people who contracted the virus in the kingdom since August/September is 24, of whom 15 have died," Rabia told a news conference in Riyadh.