Don't take the cinnamon challenge. That's the advice from doctors in a new report about a dangerous prank depicted in popular YouTube videos which has led to hospitalizations and a surge in calls to U.S. poison centers.

The fad involves daring someone to swallow a spoonful of ground cinnamon in 60 seconds without water. But the spice is caustic, and trying to gulp it down can cause choking, throat irritation, breathing trouble and even collapsed lungs, the report said.

Thousands of doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers, many wearing white lab coats, and their supporters marched in Madrid Sunday to protest against government spending cuts and plans to partly privatize medical services.

The demonstrators blew whistles and chanted "nothing for the private sector" as they marched from leading hospitals in Madrid to the landmark Plaza de Sol square in the center of the Spanish capital.

A World Health Organisation team was due Monday to wrap up a trip to Shanghai, center of China's bird flu outbreak which has killed 20 people, as part of an investigation into how the virus is spreading.

Since announcing on March 31 that H7N9 had been found in humans for the first time, China had confirmed a total of 102 cases in Shanghai and the capital Beijing as well as four provinces, the health ministry said Sunday.

There's no evidence a new bird flu strain is spreading easily among people in China even though there may be sporadic cases of the virus spreading to people who have close contacts with patients, the World Health Organization said Friday.

Fifteen global and Chinese health experts are on a mission in Beijing and Shanghai to learn more about the H7N9 bird flu virus that has killed 17 people and sickened 70 others, said Dr. Michael O'Leary, head of WHO's office in China.

Indian doctors on Friday began draining excess fluid from the head of a baby suffering from a rare disorder that caused her skull to swell to nearly double its size, a neurosurgeon told Agence France Presse.

Roona Begum, who was born with hydrocephalus, a condition that results in a build-up of cerebrospinal fluid on the brain, was found earlier this month living with her parents who are too poor to pay for life-saving treatment.

In the garden of the cannabis smoking club in the town of Mogan on Spain's Canary Islands, lush green marijuana leaves with serrated edges bask in the sun before being harvested, dried and processed to be consumed on site.

Several members of the club located on the southwest coast of the island of Gran Canaria calmly roll a joint or smoke a water pipe while one man dissects fragrant dried marijuana flowers before storing them in a jar.

The founder of a firm whose faulty breast implants sparked a global health scare told a French court Friday he had not put any lives at risk, as other defendants described him as a controlling "know-it-all".

Jean-Claude Mas made his much-anticipated first statement on the third day of one of France's biggest trials, which sees Mas and four others face charges of aggravated fraud for using non-authorized silicone gel in implants.

A Stockholm treatment center for eating disorders on Thursday said talent scouts from modelling agencies had approached their patients outside the clinic, hoping to recruit them.

"They were outside the building and waited for the girls to go out for a walk," the director of the public institution, Anna-Maria af Sandeberg, told Swedish news agency TT, without naming the agencies.

When Greece's economy took a plunge, murders and disease rates soared, according to a study published Thursday that suggests the impact of the European nation's austerity cuts may be worse than expected.

Suicide and murder rates climbed from 2007 to 2009, particularly among men, and unusual outbreaks of malaria, West Nile virus and HIV took clinicians by surprise, said the findings in the American Journal of Public Health.

A measles outbreak has hit over 800 people in Britain, a country in which up to two million schoolchildren are believed to be unprotected due to a scare which linked the vaccine with autism, figures revealed Thursday.

The outbreak is centered on the south Wales town of Swansea but health experts warn there is a serious risk that the virus could spread, particularly in London.