Researchers in China said Wednesday a trial vaccine provided "significant" protection against a virus that can cause potentially deadly hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) in children.

In the final testing phase, the vaccine proved 90 percent effective, providing protection for at least 12 months against HFMD caused by the enterovirus 71 (EV71), said a study published in The Lancet.

Alarmed at expanding waistlines around the world, the U.N.'s health agency has urged countries to get serious about reining in a ballooning obesity crisis, proposing an action plan that includes taxing unhealthy snacks and rules against marketing junk food to children.

Once considered only a problem in high-income countries like the United States, where nearly 70 percent of the adult population is overweight, obesity is now growing fastest in developing nations in Africa and Latin America, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent battling extreme poverty and disease since 2000 and now the United Nations is lining up a new war on the social distress still suffered by huge numbers around the world.

Ideas on targets to follow the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and how to pay will be in a report to be handed over by Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on Thursday to U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon.

The Saudi health ministry said on Tuesday it has recorded five new cases of a deadly SARS-like virus in the east of the oil-rich kingdom.

It identified those affected as elderly people aged between 73 and 85 who had been grappling with chronic illnesses.

France's first victim of a SARS-like virus which the 65-year-old man is thought to have contracted in Dubai, has died, health officials said Tuesday.

"The first patient is dead," a spokesman with the Directorate General for Health said, referring to the man who was hospitalized on April 23.

Laboratory tests have confirmed resistance in three H7N9 bird flu patients to a common group of antiviral drugs including Tamiflu, said a study published by The Lancet on Tuesday.

The "apparent ease" with which resistance emerged in H7N9 viruses to the only available treatment is a cause for concern, said the Chinese researchers who conducted the study.

New synthetic psychoactive substances are making their way into Europe where the Internet is becoming a big challenge in the fight against illicit drugs, the continent's drug agency warned Tuesday.

Drug use in Europe remains high even though the consumption of cannabis and cocaine appears to be slowing, as is new heroin use, the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) said in its annual report.

Women who smoke and drink heavily are at a higher risk of early death than men who do the same, a study said Tuesday.

Data taken from a Europe-wide survey of some 380,000 people aged 40 and older, revealed that women faced a disproportional risk from the already well-known ill effects of heavy alcohol and tobacco use.

A Chinese province is likely to abolish mandatory HIV tests for teachers, the first region on the mainland to do so, state media said Tuesday.

HIV carriers are excluded from civil service jobs including teaching and policing in many provinces across China, leading to accusations of discrimination from rights groups.

An 81-year-old woman who had contracted a SARS-like coronavirus has died in Saudi Arabia, raising the death toll in the kingdom to 18, the health ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

"An 81-year-old woman who was suffering from kidney failure as well as other chronic illnesses has died" in the eastern Al-Ahsaa region of oil-rich Saudi Arabia after contracting the virus, it said.