Britain is to launch a £179 million five-year healthcare program in the Democratic Republic of Congo which it hopes will reach six million people, Foreign Secretary William Hague announced on Tuesday.

The £179 million ($271 million, 211 million euros) fund will provide essential healthcare in an effort to bring peace, Hague said during a visit to the conflict-riven east of the country.

The harsh spending cuts introduced by European governments to tackle their crippling debt problems have not only pitched the region into recession — they are also being partly blamed for outbreaks of diseases not normally seen in Europe and a spike in suicides, according to new research.

Since the crisis first struck in 2008, state-run welfare and health services across Europe have seen their budgets cut, medical treatments rationed and unpopular measures such as hospital user fees introduced.

U.S. labs that research bioterror germs such as anthrax are at risk for accidents because they do not have uniform building and operation standards, a Congressional investigative group said on Monday.

A lack of oversight has persisted despite a 2009 report by the Government Accountability Office on the same topic, leaving no single agency in charge of safety or research goals at bioterror labs, the GAO said in its report.

A French drug watchdog on Tuesday released estimates for blood clots linked to birth control pills in the wake of fears that so-called third- and fourth-generation oral contraceptives boost a small risk of dangerous thrombosis.

Between 2000 and 2011, contraceptive pills were linked on average to 2,529 annual cases of blood clots, the National Agency for the Safety of Drugs and Health Products (ANSM) said.

Health products giant Johnson & Johnson on Monday issued yet another product recall, this one for OneTouch VerioIQ blood glucose meters sold in the U.S. and other countries.

They're being recalled because when a diabetic's blood sugar level is dangerously high, they do not provide a warning and instead turn off or they display an inaccurate reading.

A group representing Brazilian supermarkets has committed to keeping beef from cattle raised in the Amazon rainforest off the shelves, officials said.

The main objective of an agreement signed Monday by the Brazilian Association of Supermarkets is to reject meat from regions that are being deforested or from ranches that use slave labor or carry out other illegal practices, prosecutors said.

Emily Whitehead is kind of a big deal. At age seven, she is the only child to have beaten back leukemia with the help of a new treatment that turned her own immune cells into targeted cancer killers.

She has been in remission for 11 months and is the first pediatric patient in a growing U.S. trial that is showing signs of success after decades of research and now includes three other children and dozens of adults.

Thrashing wildly, five-year-old Reta wails as she is hoisted onto a bed during a circumcision ceremony in a school-hall-turned-clinic on Indonesia's island of Java.

"No, no, no," she cries, punching and kicking as her mother cups her tear-soaked face to soothe her.

Federal regulators are pressing the Supreme Court to stop big pharmaceutical corporations from paying generic drug competitors to delay releasing their cheaper versions of brand-name drugs. They argue these deals deny American consumers, usually for years, steep price declines that can top 90 percent.

The Obama administration, backed by consumer groups and the American Medical Association which represents doctors, says these so-called "pay for delay" deals profit the drug companies but harm consumers by adding $3.5 billion annually to their drug bills.

Sixty years after the first successful polio vaccine trial, the disease has been wiped out in much of the world, but violence, conspiracy theories and lack of cash keep it from disappearing.

"The world is closer than ever to eradicating polio," said Oliver Rosenbauer, spokesman for the World Health Organization's Global Polio Eradication Initiative.