Babies who spend time around pet dogs have fewer ear infections and respiratory ailments than those whose homes are animal-free, said a study released on Monday.

The study, published in the U.S. journal Pediatrics, did not say why but suggested that being around a dog that spends at least part of its day outdoors may boost a child's immune system in the first year of life.

The Philippines has stepped up screening of airport arrivals to prevent the entry of a mysterious disease that has killed 60 children in Cambodia, the health secretary said Saturday.

"We are more vigilant in screening passengers at the country's international airports because of this latest news and there will be no let-up until this has been contained," Health Secretary Enrique Ona told reporters.

Twenty-three people have been indicted in Poland for attempting to sell their own organs, mostly kidneys, over the Internet, national police headquarters said Friday.

"None of these people found a buyer. We found no evidence to indicate that," national police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski told Agence France Presse.

India is moving ahead with ambitious plans to spend nearly $5 billion to supply free drugs to patients -- bringing the nation closer to universal health coverage, officials said on Friday.

The "game-changing" scheme, in the words of one top Indian health ministry official, is part of the government's latest five-year spending program (2012-17) and is expected to start in October.

Polonium first hit the headlines when it was used to kill KGB agent-turned-Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

This week, Yasser Arafat's widow has called for the late Palestinian leader's body to be exhumed after scientists in Switzerland found elevated traces of radioactive polonium-210 on clothing he allegedly wore before his death in 2004.

An 8-year-old girl has died of bird flu in Indonesia's eighth death from the disease this year.

The Health Ministry said the girl, from the West Java district of Karawang, died Tuesday in a Jakarta hospital that had treated her since June 28.

Honduran authorities are investigating the deaths of 17 people who were apparently poisoned by drinking alcohol that had been mixed with methanol, officials said Thursday.

"We are conducting toxicology tests and autopsies on the bodies to see if the deaths are due to the consumption of liquor," a public prosecutor from the northern city of Siguatepeque, Israel Euceda, told Agence France Presse.

Los Angeles County voters are to decide if condom use should be obligatory for pornographic actors, after AIDS campaigners said Thursday they had collected enough signatures for a November ballot.

The campaigners submitted more than 360,000 signatures to support enforcing condom use in the U.S. porn movie industry, which is based in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.

A U.N. commission has set a recommended limit on the amount of melamine allowed in liquid infant formula after a 2008 scandal in China in which six babies died from drinking formula and milk products containing the industrial chemical.

Two years ago, the U.N. food security body known as the Codex Alimentarius Commission set the maximum limit of melamine in powdered infant formula at 1 milligram per kilogram of formula. On Wednesday, the commission said it had adopted a limit for liquid formula at 0.15 milligrams/kilogram.

Conflict in Afghanistan and vaccination problems in Pakistan have led to a rise in polio cases there, imperiling efforts to wipe out the disease worldwide, a study said Wednesday.

Newly introduced vaccines had the potential to eliminate polio in these countries if sufficient numbers of children could be reached, according to the paper, published in The Lancet medical journal.