A California woman who slapped a police officer to get arrested got her wish to go to jail in hopes she can quit smoking there.

Etta Mae Lopez pleaded no contest Thursday to smacking Sacramento County sheriff's Deputy Matt Campoy earlier this week after he left the main jail at the end of his shift.

Cambodia is on track to become one of the few countries in the world to successfully reverse its HIV epidemic and may eliminate new infections by 2020, the World Health Organization said Friday.

The Southeast Asian nation has reduced its HIV prevalence rate from a 1998 peak of 1.7 percent among people aged 15-49 to 0.7 percent in 2012 across the whole population, the WHO said in a joint statement with the Cambodian health ministry.

U.S. scientists have found a way to infect mosquitoes with bacteria in order to break the chain of malaria transmission, according to research published Thursday in a leading scientific journal.

A similar approach has helped cut back on dengue in some locations, and researchers hope that the findings could offer a path toward reducing malaria among the most common mosquitoes in the Middle East and South Asia.

U.S. researchers have developed a new test to identify antibodies capable of fighting most strains of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in a breakthrough that could accelerate the hunt for a vaccine.

A report published in the journal Science on Thursday said that scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had studied HIV-infected individuals whose blood had shown "powerful neutralization" qualities of the virus.

French health authorities said Thursday they feared the country's first case of a new SARS-like virus that has killed 18 people, mostly in SDaudi Arabia, may have infected two other people.

The 65-year-old man who came back to France from a holiday in Dubai was diagnosed with the deadly novel coronavirus, and is in intensive care in a hospital in the northern city of Douai, the health ministry said Wednesday.

A Food and Drug Administration investigation into the safety of caffeine-added foods has prompted Wrigley to take its new caffeinated gum off the market for the time being.

Wrigley said Wednesday that it will temporarily halt sales and marketing of Alert caffeinated gum after discussions with the FDA. President Casey Keller said the company made the move "out of respect" for the agency, which said it would investigate the health effects of added caffeine on children and adolescents just as Wrigley rolled out Alert late last month. A stick of the gum has an amount of caffeine equivalent to half a cup of coffee.

For the first time, the government is publicly revealing how much hospitals charge, and the differences are astounding: Some bill tens of thousands of dollars more than others for the same treatment, even within the same city.

Why does a joint replacement cost 40 times as much at one hospital as at another across the country? It's a mystery, federal health officials say.

Coca-Cola says it will make lower-calorie options and clear calorie labeling more widely available around the world, intensifying a push against critics who say its drinks pack on the pounds.

The Atlanta-based company, which makes Sprite, Fanta and Minute Maid, already offers diet drinks in most markets. But there's no consistency in their availability, particularly in emerging markets such as China and India.

Fish oil supplements rich in omega-3 fatty acids are not beneficial for patients at high risk of cardiovascular troubles and already being medicated, a study found Wednesday.

In the study, carried out in 2010 in Italy with 12,513 patients, half the group took an omega-3 supplement and the other half an olive oil placebo.

Scientists said Wednesday that flu infections were rising among pigs raised for slaughter on farms in south and southeastern China, also plagued by bird flu.

And the risk of spillover to humans was "constant or growing", according to one of the authors of a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.