The jailed founder of a French breast implant company at the heart of a global health scare could be freed Monday after eight months in prison ahead of a much-awaited trial next April.

Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) founder Jean-Claude Mas, 73, was jailed at Marseille's Baumette prison for four months in March, after refusing to pay bail. He was charged in January with causing grievous bodily harm after the scandal erupted.

Learning how to play tennis is hard enough. Now try it when you can't see.

That's what students are doing at the California School for the Blind. They're learning a form of tennis adapted for the visually impaired — and expanding the boundaries of what the blind can do.

Two-thirds of Australia's adult population are overweight or obese, a key study found Monday, with rates continuing to climb despite a drop in smoking and drinking.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) said people were continuing to pile on the kilos despite other findings indicating a switch to healthier habits.

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.