The European Commission said Friday it had no intention for the moment to ban or impose limits on perfumes or cosmetics found to cause an allergic reaction, a spokesman said Friday.

A scientific review has identified about 100 ingredients which could cause allergies and recommended that some be limited while others, such as tree mosses used in the famous Chanel 5 perfume, be banned outright.

Close monitoring of prostate cancer tumours may make radiation and surgery -- which can cause incontinence and impotence -- unnecessary, a new study has shown.

Prostate cancer is one of the slowest-growing forms of the disease, and many men with tumours may never develop symptoms during their lifetime, meaning that many are treated unnecessarily -- often with serious side-effects.

An Indian panel Friday revoked a patent granted to Swiss giant Roche for a hepatitis C drug, marking the latest setback for global pharmaceutical firms in the country's $12 billion medicine market.

The Intellectual Property Appellate Board overturned the patent awarded by the Indian Patent Office to Hoffmann-La Roche's drug Pegasys, citing a lack of evidence that it was a "new class" of drug.

China will start phasing out its reliance on organs from executed prisoners for transplants early next year as a new national donation system is implemented, a government-appointed expert has said.

Chinese officials acknowledge that a transplantation system that uses mostly organs from death-row prisoners is neither ethical nor sustainable, Wang Haibo said in an interview in the November edition of the World Health Organization's journal Bulletin.

Philippine authorities have ordered the recall of six brands of South Korean noodles from local shops after they were reported to contain a cancer-causing chemical.

The Food and Drug Administration said in a statement dated Thursday that the noodles made by Nongshim Co, "will be off the shelves immediately", and called on the public to report if they were still being sold.

Asia is hit with 30 million cases of malaria a year resulting in 42,000 deaths, a report said Friday as experts called for an urgent response to the disease which stalks billions in the region.

Most international efforts to defeat malaria have so far been concentrated on Africa, where the majority of the 650,000 worldwide deaths occur.

At the end of an unpaved road, in a quiet suburb of a sleepy town in northern Israel, horticultural revolutionaries are growing a strain of cannabis they say relieves symptoms of some chronic illnesses but without the psychotic effects that can accompany regular weed.

Behind the fence at Tikkun Olam -- Hebrew for "fixing the world" -- the green-fingered staff say they have created an Israeli first, by breeding a cannabis plant almost free of THC, tetrahydrocannabinol, the substance that gives smokers their high but can also carry a serious downside.

A drug initially developed to treat some types of cancer now appears to help people suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS), a study said Thursday.

The drug, alemtuzumab, proved effective in patient trials at reducing relapses -- a key feature of MS which sees symptoms appear sporadically.

People with pale skin and red hair may be more prone to developing a deadly form of skin cancer regardless of whether they spend time in the sun or not, a study said Wednesday.

Not only is this group more vulnerable to the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays, but a study in mice has now shown that the pigment that gives hair a red hue may in itself have cancer-causing effects, said a paper in the journal Nature.

Australian doctors Thursday hailed what they described as a world-first surgical treatment for a boy suffering from a rare disease that sends his blood pressure soaring and triggered a stroke.

Matthew Gaythorpe, 10, has suffered severe hypertension his entire life due to a combination of kidney and liver conditions called autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease and congenital hepatic fibrosis.