Some 157,000 children aged 11 to 15 start smoking every year in England, the charity Cancer Research UK said Wednesday, while almost one million -- or 27 percent of the total -- have tried smoking at least once.

The child smokers who acquire the habit each year would fill 5,200 classrooms, the charity said as it campaigns for branding-free packaging on tobacco products.

A traditional Chinese medicine company at the heart of an angry Internet campaign accusing it of violating animal welfare opened one of its controversial bear bile farms to journalists on Wednesday.

Bear bile has long been used in China to treat various health problems, despite skepticism over its effectiveness and outrage over the bile extraction process, which animal rights group say is excruciatingly painful for bears.

Deaths from liver-destroying hepatitis C are on the rise, and new data shows baby boomers especially should take heed — they are most at risk.

Federal health officials are considering whether anyone born between 1945 and 1965 should get a one-time blood test to check if their livers harbor this ticking time bomb. The reason: Two-thirds of people with hepatitis C are in this age group, most unaware that a virus that takes a few decades to do its damage has festered since their younger days.

U.S. health authorities said Tuesday they will import a drug to treat ovarian, bone marrow and AIDS-related skin cancer from India in order to ward off a worrying shortage.

"Lipodox will be imported as an alternative to Doxil," the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in a statement, noting that a temporary deal has been made with Sun Pharma Global FZE in India to supply U.S. patients with the drug.

International funding cuts threaten to deepen an HIV crisis in Myanmar, where tens of thousands of people are denied lifesaving treatment, an aid agency said Wednesday.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said only a third of the 120,000 people in need of antiretroviral drugs in Myanmar were receiving the therapy, with up to 20,000 people dying each year due to a lack of treatment.

Monkeys suffering from Parkinson's disease show a marked improvement when human embryonic stem cells are implanted in their brains, in what a Japanese researcher said Wednesday was a world first.

A team of scientists transplanted the stem cells into four primates that were suffering from the debilitating disease.

Biological research increasingly debunks the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish, a leading specialist in primate behavior told a major science conference Monday.

"Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies," Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Stars who knock back whisky, wine or beer in a movie are an invisible but potent force in prompting youngsters to experiment with alcohol or binge-drink, a large U.S. study published on Tuesday suggests.

Major exposure to scenes of alcohol consumption in movies is a bigger risk for teen drinking than having parents who drink or if booze is easily available at home, it says.

Swiss drug giant Roche said on Monday it had been given European Union approval for its treatment to fight a highly aggressive form of skin cancer.

The European Commission gave the green light to Zelboraf, a drug used to treat adults with BRAF V600 mutation-positive unresectable or metastatic melanoma, the company announced in a statement.

Health officials say the flu season is finally here — the slowest start in nearly 25 years.

Until this month, there weren't enough flu cases in the U.S. to signal the start of the season. This is the latest start to a flu season since the winter of 1987-1988.