A crude new method of making methamphetamine poses a risk even to Americans who never get anywhere near the drug: It is filling hospitals with thousands of uninsured burn patients requiring millions of dollars in advanced treatment — a burden so costly that it's contributing to the closure of some burn units.

So-called shake-and-bake meth is produced by combining raw, unstable ingredients in a two-liter soda bottle. But if the person mixing the noxious brew makes the slightest error, such as removing the cap too soon or accidentally perforating the plastic, the concoction can explode, searing flesh and causing permanent disfigurement, blindness or even death.

A quarter-century after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first prescription drugs based on the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, additional medicines derived from or inspired by the cannabis plant itself could soon be making their way to pharmacy shelves, according to drug companies, small biotech firms and university scientists.

A British company, GW Pharma, is in advanced clinical trials for the world's first pharmaceutical developed from raw marijuana instead of synthetic equivalents— a mouth spray it hopes to market in the U.S. as a treatment for cancer pain. And it hopes to see FDA approval by the end of 2013.

Turkish surgeons on Saturday successfully performed the country's first-ever face transplant, the Anatolia news agency reported.

A team of doctors at Akdeniz University in the southern city of Antalya performed the operation on a 19-year-old boy whose face was burned when he was a 40-day-old baby, said Anatolia.

The death toll in Mexico from an outbreak of A(H1N1) swine flu has hit nine, with 573 cases detected, officials said Sunday.

The strain represents some 90 percent of detected cases of influenza in the country, the health ministry said in a statement.

A hospital in southern Turkey on Saturday was attempting the world's first triple limb transplant, attaching two arms and one leg to a 34-year-old man, the country's state-run news agency reported.

A team of doctors at Akdeniz University Hospital, in the Mediterranean coastal city of Antalya, was at the same time transplanting the face of the same donor onto another patient — a 19-year-old man. It would be Turkey's first face transplant.

A seven-month old Libyan baby girl died in an Athens children’s' hospital on Friday from swine flu after an emergency airlift from Libya, the health ministry said.

The baby girl, Mohmed Khadija Ben Hussein, had been transferred on January 10 from a Libyan hospital where she had already displayed breathing problems, it added.

International scientists on Friday agreed to a temporary two-month halt to controversial research on a bird flu virus that may be easily passed among humans, citing global health concerns.

Two separate teams of researchers, one in the Netherlands and the other in the United States, found ways late last year to engineer the H5N1 virus so that it was transmitted among mammals, something that has previously been rare.

A baby believed to be the third smallest birth-weight infant ever to survive left hospital in Los Angeles, doctors and the proud parents said.

Melinda Star Guido was born last August, 16 weeks early, weighing only 9.5 ounces (270 grams) -- less than a can of soda or the same as two iPhones -- and has spent nearly five months in aneonatal intensive care unit.

Obesity among children andadults has almost doubled over the past 15 years, something which could alsoincrease the prevalence of chronic diseases in the next generations, warnedresearchers at the American University of Beirut.

During a special half-dayseminar held at AUB on January 20, 2012, the latest results of a three-yearcollaborative study on undernutrition and obesity were disseminated.

Mexico enacted tough new rules Thursday to ban advertising of "miracle cures" for weight loss, sagging body parts and more serious illnesses like prostate ailments, chronic fatigue and even cancer.

Mexico has a long history of faith healers and home remedies, but the problem has come to a head in the last few years with a constant stream of ads on television for more "scientific" sounding creams that supposedly lift or enlarge breast and buttocks, magnets that help users lose weight, or pills and powders that cure gastric problems or diabetes.