New Yorkers are living longers than Americans overall, and the margin is increasing, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday as he praised his administration's health policies.

A New Yorker born in 2010 has a life expectancy of 80.9 years, 2.2 years longer than the national life expectancy of 78.7 years at the time.

U.S. doctors say they have saved a seven-year-old girl who was close to dying from leukemia with a pioneering use of an unlikely ally: a modified form of the HIV virus.

After fighting her disease with chemotherapy for almost two years and suffering two relapses, the young girl "faced grim prospects," doctors at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia said.

Most remaining laboratory stocks of a devastating cattle disease should be destroyed to ensure the eradicated virus is not back into nature, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said Monday.

"If someone laid their hands on an eradicated virus it could cause a global disaster," OIE chief Bernard Vallat said.

Indonesia has identified the bird flu virus that killed hundreds of thousands of ducks in recent weeks as a more virulent type which is new to the country, according to a letter seen Tuesday.

"We found a highly pathogenic avian influenza sub-type H5N1 (virus) with clade 2.3..." the agriculture ministry's veterinary chief Syukur Iwantoro said in the letter obtained by Agence France Presse.

On the streets of Ulan Bator a people renowned for their horse riding skills have to contend every day with ever more Hummers, Land Cruisers and Range Rovers.

Mongolia's vast open steppes and deserts stretch for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers (miles), and it has the lowest population density of any country in the world.

Japanese food company Ito En on Tuesday issued a huge recall of Chinese-grown tea after some of it was found to contain illegal levels of pesticide residue.

The firm said it was recalling about 400,000 packages of Oolong tea after spot testing revealed pesticide residue levels above Japanese food safety limits.

A new study on Monday showed increased HIV infection rates among pregnant women living in areas with high migrant labor in South Africa, the country with one of the world's highest caseloads.

Infections in the eastern province of Mpumalanga jumped from 34.7 percent in 2009 to 36.7 percent.

Thousands of Spanish medical workers and residents angered by budget cuts and plans to partly privatize the cherished national health service marched through some of Madrid's most famous squares on Sunday.

More than 5,000 people rallied in Puerta del Sol, according to police estimates, after marching from Neptuno and Cibeles squares. Organizers estimated attendance at 25,000 protesters, many dressed in white and blue hospital scrubs. The march, called "a white tide" by organizers, was the third such large-scale protest this year.

The Agriculture Department is responding to criticism over new school lunch rules by allowing more grains and meat in kids' meals.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told members of Congress in a letter Friday that the department will do away with daily and weekly limits of meats and grains. Several lawmakers wrote the department after the new rules went into effect in September saying kids aren't getting enough to eat.

Gene detectives on Sunday said they had pinpointed how a hospital superbug arose in North America in the early 2000s and spread to Europe before becoming a source of global concern.

The germ spread through two different but closely-related strains, not one as previously thought, said the researchers.