British American Tobacco (BAT) launched an advertising campaign in New Zealand Wednesday opposing plans to introduce plain packaging, in a move the government immediately dismissed as a waste of money.

New Zealand announced in-principle support for plain packaging in April and has enthusiastically welcomed world-first legislation in Australia forcing tobacco to be sold in drab, uniform packaging with graphic health warnings.

Women seeking an abortion are seven times more likely to report physical or sexual abuse at the hands of their partners than the U.S. national average for domestic violence, a study published Monday found.

The study comes as a Republican senatorial candidate triggered a firestorm of criticism after he suggested that "legitimate rape" rarely causes pregnancy.

Doctors in Israel are beginning to believe in the power of clowning around.

Over the last few years, Israeli clowns have been popping into hospital operating rooms and intensive care units with balloons and kazoos in hand, teaming up with doctors to develop laughter therapies they say help with disorders ranging from pain to infertility.

As debate rages over the ethics of infant circumcision, a study published Monday said falling rates of the once-routine procedure in the United States could cost billions of dollars in health costs.

"We find that each circumcision not performed will lead to $313 of increased expenditures over that lifetime," said senior investigator Aaron Tobian, of the Johns Hopkins University team that did the study.

As Indonesia shifts from a month of fasting during Ramadan to a week-long eating binge for the Eid al-Fitr Muslim holiday, doctors are braced for an annual spike in complaints of rapid weight gain.

Millions in the world's most populous Muslim nation typically mark the end of the Ramadan fasting month visiting families and relatives, in reunions where traditional foods rich in sugars and fats take center stage.

Seven people, most of them elderly women, died after eating pickles contaminated with E. coli in northern Japan, officials said Sunday, in the country's deadliest mass food poisoning in 10 years.

A total of 103 others have been made ill after eating the same lightly pickled Chinese cabbage produced in late July by a company in the city of Sapporo, according to health bulletins issued by the local government.

An outbreak of cholera in Guinea has killed 82 people since February and is showing no signs of letting up, the country's health ministry said Saturday.

"A week ago we counted 60 dead and 2,054 cases ... this week we have recorded 82 dead," Dr. Sakoba Keita of the ministry's infectious diseases department told a press conference, adding that the situation was "alarming".

Health officials in Indiana and Kentucky say they are investigating farms, distributors and retailers after an outbreak of salmonella that has killed two and sickened at least 141 people nationwide was linked to cantaloupe grown in southwestern Indiana.

Officials Friday advised all Indiana residents to discard cantaloupes purchased since July 7.

Groundbreaking work with lab mice has boosted hopes for a male contraceptive pill, researchers in the United States reported on Thursday.

A compound initially sketched as a candidate for blocking cancer has been found to stop sperm generation in mice, they said.

Aircraft have begun spraying pesticide over parts of Dallas, Texas to combat an outbreak of mosquito-borne West Nile Virus blamed for 17 deaths this year, authorities said Friday.

The Texas Department of State Health Services said the aircraft covered 52,000 acres of Dallas County on Thursday night, opening a new front to stop the spread of West Nile Virus.