Health authorities are working at tightening South Africa's anti-smoking laws, proposing a total ban on indoor smoking and even making it illegal to puff away in open spaces such as beaches.

Stadiums, zoos, parks, outdoor eateries and beer gardens would all be affected. At beaches, smoking would only be allowed at least 50 meters from the closest person.

A top Vatican official called Friday on the international community to provide "free and efficient treatment" for AIDS in Africa, starting with pregnant women, mothers and their babies.

During an international conference organized by the Sant'Egidio Community, the number two in the Vatican, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, made the call "to states and to donors" to "rapidly provide those sick with AIDS with free and efficient treatment."

At least 30 people in Georgia have contracted anthrax this year, prompting authorities to step up safety measures, medical officials said Friday.

Georgia's Center for Infectious Diseases said that by year's end the ex-Soviet nation is expected to roughly match last year's total of 59 cases. That would represent a marked increase from the 28 anthrax cases the Caucasus Mountains country had in 2010.

Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche is under investigation over a failure to properly report adverse drug side-effects, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Thursday.

Inspectors at the Basel-based company's British site in Welwyn found deficiencies related to Roche's global process of detecting and reporting the adverse effects of medicines.

Young people in India, the engine of its rapidly expanding economy, are committing suicide at a much higher rate than in the West, researchers said Friday, calling for urgent intervention.

Suicide is the second-most common cause of death among young people in India, they wrote in the Lancet, and was set to overtake complications from pregnancy and childbirth as the lead cause among women aged 15 to 29.

In a shady corner of a remote, sun-baked village square in Niger, aid worker Boubacar Halirou wraps his measuring tape around the skinny arms of a hungry toddler and identifies another victim of severe malnutrition.

Halirou, who works for the local aid group Befen, is crisscrossing the region looking for emaciated youngsters as the impoverished west African desert nation faces a drought-driven food crisis.

Turkey's conservative government has dropped plans for a controversial bill that would have slashed the time limit for abortions; a parliamentary source told Agence France Presse on Thursday.

"The government has backed away from initial plans to curb abortion rights," the source said on condition of anonymity, adding that the Islamist-rooted government would instead seek to limit the number of Caesarean sections being performed in the country.

More drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and fewer antibiotics are being prescribed to U.S. children and teenagers compared to a decade ago, said a U.S. study on Monday.

Also, contraceptive prescriptions soared 93 percent from 2002 to 2010, though the reasons for the rise remain unclear, said the research published in the journal Pediatrics.

Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent insists his company is not responsible for the rise in U.S. obesity despite New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's recent moves to limit the consumption of sugary drinks.

"This is an important, complicated societal issue that we all have to work together to provide a solution," Kent told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published late Monday.

A total of 46.3 million people in the United States do not have health coverage, a trend that has been rising in the past 15 years, said a U.S. survey published Tuesday.

There was good news for children in the data from the 2011 National Health Interview Survey, which showed that seven percent of U.S. youths were uninsured last year at the time of the interview, compared to 13.9 percent in 1997.