Shanghai said the end of an embarrassing pollution case which saw dead pigs floating down the city's main river was in sight, with the total number recovered now standing at more than 16,000.

"The city's water territory has already basically finished the work of fishing out the floating dead pigs," said a Shanghai government statement released late on Sunday.

Have a heart problem? If it's fixable, there's a good chance it can be done without surgery, using tiny tools and devices that are pushed through tubes into blood vessels.

Heart care is in the midst of a transformation. Many problems that once required sawing through the breastbone and opening up the chest for open heart surgery now can be treated with a nip, twist or patch through a tube.

Scientists said Sunday they had found mutations in 26 genes that may cause Esophageal cancer, a breakthrough they hope will lead to new drugs for the deadly and increasingly frequent disease.

A team of experts in the United States unraveled the genetic code of tumor cells from 149 patients, which they compared to healthy cells to identify a mutation signature for esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC).

Disease experts called Sunday for decisive leadership and more research funding to fend off the "very real" risk of an untreatable strain of tuberculosis (TB) emerging as more and more people develop resistance to existing drugs.

In a series of papers in the Lancet medical journal to mark World TB Day on Sunday, they warned that health systems risked being overwhelmed by increasing numbers of drug-resistant TB patients.

As much as 14 percent of chronic childhood asthma may be caused by people living near busy roads and exposed to traffic pollution, a study in 10 European cities found Friday.

The study, released by the European Respiratory Journal, matched local health data with exposure to traffic pollution in Barcelona, Bilbao, Brussels, Granada, Ljubljana, Rome, Seville, Stockholm, Valencia and Vienna.

On the sidewalks and the subways it's clear: Japan is becoming a sea of surgical masks. It's about pollen, about germs and even a little about China, its polluting rival across the sea.

Simple masks. High-tech masks. Scented masks. Masks in pink and purple. Yano Research Institute says it's a 26 billion yen ($274 million) market. The industry leader, Kowa Co., says it plans to quintuple production this year.

North Dakota legislators aimed to outlaw all abortions Friday by passing a law that asks voters to amend the state constitution to define life as beginning at conception.

If passed, the amendment would grant full legal protection to embryos and fetuses and could outlaw some forms of birth control, stem cell research and possibly in vitro fertilization.

One in five people ski having consumed alcohol, and 29 percent of these hurtle down the piste over the legal limit for driving, an Austrian survey showed Thursday.

"People skiing under the influence of alcohol pose an increased risk to themselves and to other people on the slopes," said Alexandra Kuehnelt-Leddihn from the Austrian Road Safety Board (KFV).

Cases of tuberculosis reached an all-time low in the United States last year, but the disease continued to affect minorities at much higher rates than whites, health authorities said Thursday.

There were fewer than 10,000 U.S. cases of TB for the first time since records began being compiled in 1953, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A U.S. agency has issued a long-awaited report saying it found no proof that decades of military practice bombing on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques sickened residents who blame it for high rates of cancer, asthma and other illnesses.

The report was released this week and follows four previous assessments and several updates by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry that reached similar conclusions.