Scores of Taiwanese activists staged a protest in Taipei on Friday against U.S. beef containing the feed additive ractopamine ahead of a parliamentary vote on a controversial bill to allow such imports.

"American bullies, toxic beef," the protesters shouted, waving matching placards as they rallied outside the de facto U.S. embassy in Taipei.

An increasingly detailed map of the genome of a fetus could lead to easier screening for a host of rare disorders, according to U.S. research published Wednesday.

Although previous studies have shown that the fetal genome can be glimpsed with just a sample of the mother's blood, the latest research offers a more accurate view of the fetal makeup by combining paternal and maternal DNA, said the authors of the study in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Children exposed to multiple CT scans could be up to three times likelier to contract cancer of the blood, brain or bone marrow later in life, according to research published Thursday.

Writing in The Lancet medical journal, a team of scientists in Canada, Britain and the United States said the cancer risk, in absolute terms, appears to be small.

China faces a "serious epidemic" of drug-resistant tuberculosis according to the first-ever nationwide estimate of the size of the problem there, said a U.S.-published study on Wednesday.

"In 2007, one third of the patients with new cases of tuberculosis and one half of the patients with previously treated tuberculosis had drug-resistant disease," said the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

A Malaysian prince is promoting a novel weapon against the worsening scourge of dengue fever: a protein "pill" that starves mosquito larvae and could revolutionize the global dengue fight.

It is a fight that is intensifying: more than 2.5 billion people -- around 40 percent of Earth's population -- live in areas susceptible to the mosquito-borne virus, with up to 100 million infected annually, according to the World Health Organization.

A potentially dangerous sexually transmitted disease that infects millions of people each year is growing resistant to drugs and could soon become untreatable, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

The U.N. health agency is urging governments and doctors to step up surveillance of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, a bacterial infection that can cause inflammation, infertility, pregnancy complications and, in extreme cases, lead to maternal death. Babies born to mothers with gonorrhea have a 50 percent chance of developing eye infections that can result in blindness.

A simple blood test can save lives by helping doctors swiftly diagnose whether a patient with early breast cancer faces high risk of death or relapse after treatment, specialists said Wednesday.

Tumor cells in a blood sample, when taken at an early stage of the disease, are an accurate predictor of a patient's survival chances, the team said in the journal The Lancet Oncology.

The Walt Disney Company, in a first for a U.S. media giant, said Tuesday it will ban junk-food advertising on its TV channels and websites from 2015 to help fight obesity among U.S. children.

"This new initiative is truly a game changer for the health of our children," said First Lady Michelle Obama, a champion of better eating for young people who attended Disney's landmark announcement in Washington.

Canada said Tuesday it was moving to ban the main substance used to make "bath salts" -- the drug linked to a grisly attack in the United States in which a man almost killed another by chewing his face.

The drug -- which as its name suggests resembles regular bath salts in texture -- can spark an often aggressive, chaotic experience for users, including intense hallucinations.

A critical shortage of generic drugs in the United States, particularly in cancer care, could be curbed with legislation now being hammered out by the US House and Senate, doctors said on Monday.

Similar versions have passed each chamber and may be reconciled in time for President Barack Obama to sign them this month or next, said a panel of experts at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting.