Doctors in the south Indian city, Hyderabad claimed that they had carried out a multiple-bypass beating-heart surgery on Friday on a patient as he kept on listening to music, reported The Times of India.

The two-and-a-half-hour operation took place on Friday in Care Hospital in Hyderabad. Chief cardiac surgeon Dr Prateek Bhatnagar, who led the team of doctors, claimed it was the first 'fully-awake' coronary arterial bypass operation performed in India

The World Health Organization is concerned that a deadly strain of bird flu, that has already killed more than 50 people in Asian countries might mutate into a form that can be passed from one person to another and create a global pandemic.

WHO spokesman Peter Cordingley says so far there is no conclusive proof of human-to-human transmission. "We have found a couple of cases that were very suspicious, but we couldn't actually hammer that nail home

Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates pledged $250 million for a total of $450 million to a project he initiated in 2003 to get the world's top scientific minds to find remedies of the deadliest diseases.

He announced the contribution while delivering a speech as a featured speaker at the World Health Organization's annual assembly on Monday

Officials in Vietnam, the country hit hardest by the bird flu epidemic, say they may not be able to contain the virus until 2007, because many experts are still baffled by the way it spreads. Health officials are uncertain how the virus spreads from waterfowl to poultry, and then to people. "There are cases where a healthy person carries the virus without showing clinical symptoms, which has made the risk of spreading the virus in the community greater," Deputy Health Minister Tran Chi Liem said. Since its arrival to Asia in late 2003, H5NI, has infected 71 Vietnamese and killed 36. Now, the World Health Organization fears the virus may mutate into a new form that would spread easier among people and cause a global pandemic in which millions would die. "If the virus changes, it will be the biggest global health crisis," said Hans Troedsson, the WHO representative in Vietnam, predicting "50 to 100 million deaths in the worst situation". Bird flu has killed 51 people in Asia - 36 Vietnamese, including 15 since December, 12 Thais and three Cambodians - since arriving in Asia in late 2003, brought probably by migrating wild fowl

Geneva (AHN)-On Thursday the World Health Organization said that the situation for pregnant mothers and babies had worsened since the 1990s in dozens of countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite defying global advances in medicine one woman still dies every minute in pregnancy or childbirth, while each 60 seconds 20 young children are victims to easily preventable disease. WHO officials believe that some countries in Africa could take another 150 years to reach U.N. targets for reducing maternal mortality. Pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, measles, AIDS and neonatal ailments were the main killers of children under five. The toll includes more than four million newborns who die before they are a month old, but not some 3.3 million stillbirths annually. "The lifetime risk for a woman to lose a newborn baby is now 1 in 5 in Africa, compared with 1 in 125 in more developed countries," the report said. WHO determined that an additional $9 billion is required for each year of the next decade to reach the U.N. Millennium Development Goals of reducing child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by the target date of 2015