British and U.S. researchers said on Friday that passive smoking can significantly raise a person’s risk of dementia and other cognitive problems to the extent that people who live with a smoker stand a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

Vienna  - The West Nile virus, which can cause meningitis in humans, has reached Austria, an virologist said Friday in Vienna.

Birds carrying the virus were detected in Austria for the first time last year, Norbert Nowotny, a professor at the Vienna University of Veterinary Medicine, told Austrian press agency APA.

The disease was imported from Hungary last summer, but only birds in eastern Austria fell ill. No humans were infected by the disease which is spread by mosquitos.

The Apollo Hospitals Group in India has introduced a robot radiotherapy machine, Cyberknife in the Asia Pacific.

The new treatment, which uses real time image guidance technology and computer-controlled robotics to deliver a very little dosage of radiation to kill cancer cells by reducing the course of treatment to less than a week with sub millimeter accuracy.

This saves the surrounding healthy tissue while adjusting for patient and tumour movements during treatment.

NHS is offering shopping vouchers to children who quit smoking and pregnant women who give up smoking. Supporters of the scheme claim that there is no harm in offering small incentive to help children leave this bad habit whereas people opposite to this scheme said this scheme might encourage children to smoke for sake of rewards.

Fats in limited quantity are necessary for proper functioning of human body. High levels of saturated fat in the diet can increase risk of heart and circulatory diseases, such as coronary heart disease, heart attacks, angina and stroke.

Saturated fat is found in dairy and red meat. 30g saturated fat in a day is enough for the average man and 20g saturated fat a day is enough for the average woman. Children aged 5-10 should eat no more than 20g of saturated fat per day. Recent data showed that children aged five have higher level of fat.

Nearly a month after its first bird flu case was noticed in a southeastern border region, Nepal’s Agriculture Ministry announced, on Wednesday, that the country is free of bird flu.

On January 16, the health ministry declared that chickens near Kakadbhitta, 400 km south of the capital Katmandu, were found positive for the H5N1 virus, the first confirmed case in the country.