Flu season in the U.S. is off to its earliest start in nearly a decade — and it could be a bad one.

Health officials on Monday said suspected flu cases have jumped in five Southern states, and the primary strain circulating tends to make people sicker than other types. It is particularly hard on the elderly.

The American Psychiatric Association has voted to review its classification of certain mental disorders, turning autism into a single, all-encompassing category and removing Asperger's syndrome as a separate ailment.

This weekend's vote by the group's board of trustees marks the first revision of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders since 1994 and the fifth since it first came about.

Rocio Ramirez poses for a portrait with a colorful Mexican shawl covering one side of her near naked body, revealing her erotic side to prove that HIV has not robbed her sexuality and self-esteem.

Smiling with straight black hair for another shot, Ramirez holds a female condom as part of a photographic workshop to show that women with HIV/AIDS can still feel beautiful despite the virus and the side effects of their treatment.

Jordan's health minister has said that two deaths in the kingdom from a SARS-like virus earlier this year which were confirmed by the World Health Organisation last week were isolated cases.

"Since April, the health ministry has not recorded any case of the coronavirus in Jordan," Abdullatif Wreikat said in comments carried by the official Petra news agency on Sunday.

South Africa, home to the world's largest HIV caseload, on Saturday unveiled a 1.5 kilometer AIDS ribbon in Johannesburg, with activists and officials pledging to curb the epidemic.

Created from over 6,000 red T-shirts pinned together, the ribbon was rolled out at Constitution Hill, which houses the country's Constitutional Court, and unfurled through the streets of Braamfontein.

The Supreme Court announced Friday it will decide whether companies can patent human genes, a decision that could reshape medical research in the United States and the fight against diseases like breast and ovarian cancer.

The justices' decision will likely resolve an ongoing battle between scientists who believe that genes carrying the secrets of life should not be exploited for commercial gain and companies that argue that a patent is a reward for years of expensive research that moves science forward.

Problem-plagued Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals Inc. has halted production of generic cholesterol drug Lipitor while it investigates how tiny glass particles got into the ingredients used for dozens of batches of the drug that were recalled in November. It was Ranbaxy's second recall of the drug, called atorvastatin, since August.

The Food and Drug Administration said Ranbaxy won't resume manufacturing atorvastatin until it determines the cause of the latest problem and fixes it. The recall was due to "possible contamination with very small glass particles similar to the size of a grain of sand," according to the FDA.

International health officials have confirmed two more fatal cases of a mysterious respiratory virus in the Middle East.

The virus has so far sickened nine people and killed five of them. The new disease is a coronavirus related to SARS, which killed some 800 people in a global epidemic in 2003, and belongs to a family of viruses that most often causes the common cold.

A Chinese study published on World AIDS Day on Saturday says drugs used to curb HIV in infected people also help protect their uninfected partner, but far less effectively than other research has found.

The idea of using antiretrovirals to prevent HIV as well as treat it leapt into the headlines last year when researchers reported stellar results from trials in Africa, Asia and the United States.

Andrei Mandrykin, an inmate at Prison No. 85 outside Kiev, has HIV. He looks ghostly and much older than his 35 years. But Mandrykin is better off than tens of thousands of his countrymen, because is he receiving treatment amid what the World Health Organization says is the worst AIDS epidemic in Europe.

Ahead of World AIDS Day on Saturday, international organizations have urged the Ukrainian government to increase funding for treatment and do more to prevent HIV from spreading from high-risk groups into the mainstream population, where it is even harder to manage and control.