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The Democratic-controlled House has narrowly passed landmark health care reform legislation, handing President Barack Obama a hard won victory on his signature domestic priority.

Suspected swine flu is sweeping a traditional Eskimo whaling village on a remote Alaska island — prompting an urgent medical mission to deliver help.

In Britain, there are no long lines of people seeking swine flu vaccine. Doctor's offices aren't swamped with desperate calls. And there are no cries of injustice that the vaccine is going to wealthy corporations or healthy people who don't really need it.

Only about a third of adults who have tried to get a swine flu vaccine have been able to get it, according to a new national poll released Friday.

The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that it has warned several companies to stop selling banned flavored cigarettes to U.S. consumers online.

Some of New York's biggest companies, including Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, received doses of swine flu vaccine for at-risk employees, drawing criticism that the hard-to-find vaccine is going first to the privileged.

French scientists mixed gene therapy and bone marrow transplants in two boys to seemingly halt a brain disease that can kill by adolescence. The surprise ingredient: They disabled the HIV virus so it couldn't cause AIDS, and then used it to carry in the healthy new gene.

The World Health Organization's flu chief said the swine flu virus has now become the predominant flu strain worldwide.

It seemed like a great idea — doing bypass surgery while the heart is still beating, sparing patients the complications that can come from going on a heart-lung machine. Now the first big test of this method has produced a surprise: Bypass has fewer problems and is more successful done the old way.

The global recession and pressure to divert funds to other health crises are hurting the fight against AIDS, a medical group warned Thursday, with one health worker saying he feared a return to the days when the AIDS virus was a death sentence in Africa.