Hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan's conflict-torn state of South Kordofan are on the brink of famine as Khartoum keeps up a blockade on aid agencies, a new survey released Thursday said.

The study, carried out by an international aid group and released via the Washington-based Enough Project, warns the situation in the state resembles the conditions that led up to the Horn of Africa famine in 2011.

At least 19 people have died in a widening fungal meningitis outbreak linked to a contaminated steroid, U.S. health officials said Wednesday.

The flare-up has caused 247 cases across 15 states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on its website.

An Indonesian cruise ship crew member died of meningitis on Tuesday, nine days after being hospitalized with three colleagues in the western Italian port city of Livorno, health sources said.

Ermandiasa I Gede, 32, died despite intensive attempts to save him since he was hospitalized on October 7.

Between rice fields and coconut trees on Indonesia's "paradise" island of Bali, a man lies chained by the ankles to a rotting wooden bed in a garden, staring at roosters tottering by.

I Ketut Lingga, 54, has schizophrenia and is one of more than 15,000 Indonesians with a mental illness who are either chained, caged or placed in primitive stocks, according to health ministry data.

Research on Wednesday showed HIV infections in Australia jumped eight percent last year and 50 percent in the past decade, which health activists said was a "call to action".

An annual report of HIV, hepatitis and sexually transmitted infections in Australia showed there were 1,137 new cases of the human immunodeficiency virus in 2011 -- an 8.2 percent increase from 2010.

Uruguay is set Wednesday to become only the second country in mostly Catholic South America to legalize abortion, in a shift one top official says makes it a regional health care leader.

With more cows than people, this sleepy, well-educated nation of just three million sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil, might seem an unlikely trailblazer on the public health front.

Political upheaval, violence, natural disasters and development projects have forced some 72.4 million people to migrate from their homes worldwide, the Red Cross said Tuesday.

"This figure rises relentlessly every year, and most migrants are either in protracted displacement situations or permanently dispossessed," the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in its annual World Disasters Report.

International organized crime is worth 870 billion dollars, the head of the UN's office on drugs and crime (UNODC) said Monday, urging greater coordination in fighting it.

"We are able to quantify the cost of transnational organized crime, it is $870 billion (672 billion euros)," UNODC executive director Yury Fedotov told a crime conference in Vienna.

U.S. health officials identified two new drugs Monday which may have infected patients with meningitis as they investigate a widening outbreak tied to tainted products from a Massachusetts pharmacy.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) urged doctors to contact patients who received those and other drugs produced by the firm to warn they are at risk of developing the slow-moving but potentially deadly infection.

Smoking in cars raises levels of dangerous fine-particle pollutants to many times the limit recommended by the world's health agency, a study published on Monday said.

Doctors in Britain measured concentrations of fine particles in cars driven by 17 people, 14 of them smokers, using an electronic monitor on the back seat.