In a worrisome sign, a bird flu in China appears to have mutated so that it can spread to other animals, raising the potential for a bigger threat to people, scientists said Wednesday.

So far the flu has sickened nine people in China and killed three. It's not clear how they became infected, but there's no evidence that the virus is spreading easily among people.

Its raw materials are plants and it bases its products on texts dating back millennia, but don't dare call India's biggest herbal healthcare group a maker of "alternative medicine".

"It's high time people took us very seriously and did not view us as an alternative form of medicine," says Philipe Haydon, the India chief executive of the Himalaya group from his office in tech and healthcare hub Bangalore.

Studies in rats have shown that stimulating a sleepy brain region in cocaine addicts can diminish craving for the drug, a technique that should also work in humans, scientists said Wednesday.

A team in the United States trained rats to "self-administer"cocaine by pressing two levers.

A man in the Chinese province of Zhejiang has died of the H7N9 strain of bird flu, state media said Wednesday, bringing the total deaths attributed to the virus to three since the first human cases.

He was one of two H7N9 avian influenza infections reported in Zhejiang in eastern China, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing local authorities, bringing the country's total number of cases to nine.

Individuals and governments need to step up their efforts to battle high blood pressure, which is estimated to affect more than one in three adults aged over 25, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

Around a billion people around the globe suffer from the condition, also known as hypertension, the United Nations health agency said.

Italy on Tuesday announced plans to raise the legal limit for buying electronic cigarettes to 18 years from a previous 16, citing the high dose of nicotine inhaled when using the smokeless product.

The new rules will go into effect on April 23 and follow a study ordered by the health ministry which found that the level of nicotine consumed -- even through moderate use -- of so-called e-cigarettes exceeds the recommended level established by the European Food Safety Authority.

Suspicion quickly fell on a research assistant who had been working in a scientist's lab when three vials of a possible cancer-fighting compound disappeared recently from the professor's desk at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Security video showed Hua Jun Zhao, who studied in China and whose wife lives there, was the only person who entered the professor's office that day. Investigators later found research results from another professor on Zhao's computer.

A decrease in levels of the sleep hormone melatonin has been linked to an increased risk of adult onset diabetes, according to a study published Tuesday.

Research in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that 370 women with diabetes were compared with 370 women of the same race and age without the disease.

A tiny Samoan airline that is the first to introduce a fare system based on passengers' weight hailed the success of its policy Wednesday and predicted it would become a global norm.

Four months after introducing the "fare-weight" system -- the lighter the passenger the lighter the fare -- Air Samoa chief executive Chris Langton said the feedback from fliers of all sizes has been positive.

Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad was in hospital for an inflamed pancreas on Tuesday, a medic in Ramallah said, having been admitted the night before with stomach pains.

"Medical tests and scans show that Fayyad is suffering from pancreatic inflammation," a doctor at the hospital in the West Bank city told Agence France Presse.