One in ten South Africans is HIV positive but AIDS-related deaths are falling as ramped-up treatment begins to have an impact, the country's official statistics agency said Tuesday. After years of dragging its heels on the HIV/AIDS crisis, since 2004 South Africa has developed the world's largest HIV treatment programme. New data indicate that drive is working. The disease will be responsible for 32 percent of all deaths this year. While still high, that is a dramatic fall from 48 percent in 2005.

French health authorities said on Thursday they feared the country's first case of a new SARS-like virus that has killed 18 people, mostly in Saudi Arabia, may have infected two other people. The 65-year-old man who returned to France from a holiday in Dubai was diagnosed with the deadly novel coronavirus, and is in intensive care in a hospital in the northern city of Douai, the health ministry said on Wednesday. "This is the first and only confirmed case in France to date," it added.

French health authorities said Friday they suspected a third person of being infected after coming into contact with a man confirmed to be suffering from a new SARS-like virus that has killed 18 people, mostly in Saudi Arabia. "We have a third suspected case this morning, a nurse from Douai" in northern France, the deputy director of the regional ARS health agency, Sandrine Segovia Kueny, told France Bleu Nord radio. A 65-year-old man is in intensive care in a hospital in Douai after being diagnosed with the novel coronavirus following a holiday in Dubai.

The government on Monday enforced countermeasures against the H7N9 strain of bird flu, under which patients can be compelled to be hospitalized or to stop working for up to two years. The action is being taken in the face of the rapid spread of the virus in China and at a time when many tourists return home from overseas at the end of Japan's Golden Week holidays from late April to early May, according to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.