As relations between Tokyo and Beijing appear increasingly in need of major surgery, officials in the far north of Japan are hoping the nascent industry of medical tourism can thrive unscathed.

They are quietly confident that a spat over disputed islands will not seriously impact the growing number of relatively wealthy Chinese visiting Japan for its high quality treatment, therefore keeping the lifeblood pumping in an industry that analysts say could one day be worth $7.0 billion a year.

Women can add nine years to their lives by quitting smoking before the age of 40 but still face a 20-percent higher death rate than those who never smoked, a study said Saturday.

Published in The Lancet, a survey of nearly 1.2 million women in Britain showed that smoking throughout adulthood chopped on average 11 years off lifespan.

The black mold creeping into the spines of hundreds of people who got tainted shots for back pain marks uncharted medical territory.

Never before has this particular fungus been found to cause meningitis. It's incredibly hard to diagnose, and to kill — requiring at least three months of a treatment that can cause hallucinations. There's no good way to predict survival, or when it's safe to stop treating, or exactly how to monitor those who fear the fungus may be festering silently in their bodies.

China's legislature on Friday passed a long-awaited mental health law that aims to prevent people from being involuntarily held and unnecessarily treated in psychiatric facilities — abuses that have been used against government critics and triggered public outrage.

The law standardizes mental health care services, requiring general hospitals to set up special outpatient clinics or provide counseling, and calls for the training of more doctors.

An unprecedented crackdown in 16 African countries netted 82 million doses of illegal or counterfeit drugs, including antibiotics, contraceptives and malaria treatments, the World Customs Organization (WCO) said on Thursday.

The operation, called Vice Grips 2, was carried out by customs inspectors in 16 ports from July 11 to 20, it said.

Germany became the fourth country Thursday to ban sales of flu vaccines made by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, following embargoes by Italy, Switzerland and Austria.

Announcing the latest ban, German health authorities said four batches of the Begripal flu vaccine -- also marketed as Agrippal -- and one batch of the Fluad vaccine were no longer for sale.

Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis insisted early Thursday that its flu vaccines were safe despite a sales ban by Italy, Switzerland and Austria.

"Novartis confirms its confidence in the safety and efficacy of its seasonal influenza vaccines Agrippal and Fluad," the company said in a statement released overnight.

Scientists on Wednesday reported that, in pioneering experiments on human eggs, they had replaced a genetic mechanism blamed for crippling diseases.

The laboratory breakthrough could one day lead to human trials to avert so-called mitochondrial disorders, they said.

Aspirin, one of the world's oldest and cheapest drugs, has shown remarkable promise in treating colon cancer in people with mutations in a gene that's thought to play a role in the disease.

Among patients with the mutations, those who regularly took aspirin lived longer than those who didn't, a major study found. Five years after their cancers were diagnosed, 97 percent of the aspirin users were still alive versus 74 percent of those not taking the drug.

U.S. officials revoked the license Wednesday of a Massachusetts pharmacy cited for significant sanitary violations as the toll from a meningitis outbreak tied to its tainted drugs rose to 24.

The New England Compounding Center voluntarily shut down operations and recalled all of its products in the wake of the unprecedented outbreak.