The deadly U.S. shooting rampage last week has revived debate about access to mental health care -- a tough issue as state funds dry up and laws make it difficult to treat people against their will.

So far, authorities have not yet confirmed that the Newtown shooter, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, suffered from any particular psychiatric disorder.

Solo rock stars are twice as likely to die prematurely as counterparts who perform in groups, a study published in the journal BMJ Open said Wednesday.

British researchers examined the fate of 1,489 rock and pop performers who had risen to fame in a study period that spanned half a century, from Elvis Presley in 1956 to the Arctic Monkeys in 2006.

The European Union plans to ban menthol cigarettes and force tobacco firms to print large health warnings covering 75 percent of packets in proposals released on Wednesday, the first for more than a decade.

The proposed new rules on labeling, ingredients and smokeless products, fall short of demands by some health campaigners for a total ban on company branding and logos on packets, along the lines of measures enforced this month in Australia.

A study due to be released Wednesday casts doubt on links between cancer and toxic dust in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York -- only six months after dozens of cancers were declared eligible for compensation.

The New York Health Department study, which will appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 against the World Trade Center "resulted in the release of known and suspected carcinogens into the environment."

Lisa Peterson went straight to the dogs -- therapy dogs, that is -- when she returned home to Newtown from a business trip to Florida upon learning of the Sandy Hook school massacre.

"I saw them and I just had to come over and hug them," Peterson said Tuesday as she stroked Abbie Einstein and Smartie Jones, two gentle, purebred golden retrievers whose mission in life is to make people feel better.

Chinese researchers have identified a bacteria which may cause obesity, according to a new paper suggesting diets that alter the presence of microbes in humans could combat the condition.

Researchers in Shanghai found that mice bred to be resistant to obesity even when fed high-fat foods became excessively overweight when injected with a kind of human bacteria and subjected to a rich diet.

Ireland will introduce draft legislation and regulations to provide limited abortion in cases where the mother's life is at risk, the government announced Tuesday.

It follows a 2010 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling that found Ireland failed to implement properly the constitutional right to abortion where a woman's life is at risk.

Ukrainian health officials say 37 people have died from the severe cold spell that hit the country this month.

Temperatures have dropped as low as minus-17 C (2 F).

Philippine Catholic church leaders vowed Tuesday to overturn a birth control bill after lawmakers passed landmark legislation to make sex education and birth control more widely available.

The Senate and the House of Representatives approved the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill late Monday, putting it on course to be signed into law by President Benigno Aquino within a week, after its final wording has been decided.

A four-year-old boy has died of bird flu in Indonesia, the health ministry said Tuesday, the 10th fatal case in the country this year.

The boy, from Bogor district in western Java, died on December 6 after a week of high fever.