Nine Palestinians have died in an outbreak of the H1N1 influenza strain known as swine flu, the office of Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad said on Saturday.

"Latest figures and information...show that 187 cases have so far been recorded, the majority of which are in the northern West Bank," it said in a statement. "The number of recorded deaths... stands at nine until now."

At least 24 people, mostly drug addicts seeking a fix, have died after drinking toxic cough syrup in an eastern Pakistani city, officials said on Saturday.

President Benigno Aquino's government called for reconciliation on Saturday after a "divisive" birth control act was signed into law despite bitter opposition from the influential Catholic church.

Making sex education and contraceptives more widely available to the poor, the landmark legislation takes effect in mid-January, Aquino's spokeswoman Abigail Valte said.

The U.N. chief on Friday named a U.S. health expert as special adviser in fighting Haiti's cholera epidemic, which has claimed more than 7,750 lives and is widely blamed on U.N. peacekeepers.

Ban Ki-Moon has appointed Paul Farmer, a doctor and professor at Harvard Medical School, to "help galvanize support for the elimination of cholera in Haiti," the United Nations said in a statement.

Major Western pharmaceutical companies carried out tests of medications in the 1980s on patients in communist East Germany, in some cases without the subjects' knowledge, a media report said Friday.

"We have documents showing there were contracts between Western drug companies and East German institutions for medical tests," a staff member at the German national archive told Agence France Presse, partially confirming a report in the daily Der Tagesspiegel.

Brazilian health officials say doctors will be required to notify authorities of every HIV case in the nation.

Until now, doctors were only required to notify state and federal officials when patients developed AIDS.

A powerful cancer fighter might be sitting right on your plate.

A new study from Baylor College of Medicine researchers shows that a compound found in cruciferous veggies, like broccoli, is able to kill leukemia cells in the laboratory.

South Africa's anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela was recovering at his Johannesburg home Thursday, convalescing and receiving further care after a nearly three-week hospital stay, officials said.

The revered 94-year-old had been admitted to a Pretoria hospital on December 8, undergoing treatment for a lung infection and gallstones in the latest health scare for South Africa's first black president.

Obesity rates among small children may finally be on the decline after more than tripling in the United States the past 30 years, a study out Wednesday indicated.

The study found that obesity rates peaked in 2004 and then declined slightly among low-income children aged two to four who receive benefits from a federal food stamp program called SNAP.

The darkness is total. Mundane gestures suddenly become complicated. How do you find the door to your room, cook a meal or cross the road?

The "Invisible Exhibition" in the Polish capital Warsaw offers an opportunity to understand what it is like to be sightless, as blind guides steer visitors round in blacked-out rooms .