U.S. and South African lawyers are asking a court to allow thousands of miners with lung diseases to sue leading South African gold mining companies they accuse of negligence.

Lawyers say AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields and Harmony could face the largest damages suit in South African history if the court recognizes their case as a class action.

Paul Ryan works out and watches his diet, but a new study shows that clean living can only go so far to help people like the vice presidential candidate overcome a strong family history of heart disease.

The study of 4 million people — the largest ever on heart risks that run in families — found that having a close relative die young of cardiovascular disease doubles a person's odds of developing it by age 50. This risk was independent of other factors like high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes, and was even higher if more than one close family member had died young.

When she was 20 years old, Alphonsina Zara was pregnant with her first child. After three days of excruciating labor, though she was in a health center, her baby was stillborn.

Doctors found that she had developed a hole in her birth canal, a severe medical condition called obstetric fistula. She not only lost her baby, it disrupted her life for the next 14 years.

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".