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Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay:

Record Number of New HIV Cases in 2003

The virus that causes AIDS infected a record number of people worldwide in 2003 despite growing international efforts to control it, according to a United Nations report released Tuesday.

Five million new HIV infections were counted last year, more than in any single year since the crisis began, the Associated Press reported of the U.N.'s findings. And nine of 10 people who needed treatment worldwide didn't get it, the report's authors lamented.

The AIDS virus appeared to be running rampant in Eastern Europe and Asia, the report continued. It said $12 billion a year would be needed to try to contain the epidemic, up from $10 billion annually that had been predicted earlier.

The latest estimate suggested that 38 million people are infected with HIV worldwide. Money to combat the epidemic reached about $5 billion in 2003, which is less than half of what was needed, the U.N. report said.

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Bird Flu Resurfaces in China

Bird flu has returned to China, the Beijing government confirmed Tuesday in announcing that an unspecified number of chickens had died from the disease in east China's Anhui province.

The official Xinhua news agency reported that all poultry around the affected farm had been slaughtered and others within a larger radius had been vaccinated.

The same deadly H5N1 strain led to the deaths of millions of Asian birds earlier this year, and had spread to humans in Vietnam and Thailand, killing at least 24 people.

No new human infections have been associated with the latest outbreak, Xinhua reported.

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Drug Firms Fail to Register Clinical Trials: FDA

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry has repeatedly broken federal law by not reporting all human drug trials to government statisticians, according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration allegations reported by the Washington Post.

The FDA concedes it hasn't enforced the law, since the 1997 statute fails to spell out penalties or give the agency authority to crack down on violators, the newspaper reported Tuesday.

As an example of how widespread the violations appear to be, a 2002 FDA analysis found that only 48 percent of cancer drug studies had been registered with the federal government's ClinicalTrials.gov database, the newspaper reported. The registry was begun in 1998, and has since registered nearly 11,000 trials, according to the Post.

The issue has gained importance with recent revelations that drugmakers failed to disclose trials concluding that some antidepressants proved no better than sugar pills in combating depression in children, the Post pointed out.

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Sen. Hatch Predicts Easing of Stem Cell Restrictions

The Bush administration's restrictions on embryonic stem cell research may be close to ending, a U.S. Senate Republican leader has predicted.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah told CNN's Late Edition Sunday that there were enough votes in the Senate to end a filibuster on the issue. But, Hatch said, he believed that it was more likely that a compromise would be reached between supporters of using embryonic stem cells for disease research and those in the Bush administration who oppose any sort of research that uses the stem cells from human embryos.

The standard for the compromise might be set by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Hatch said. "That has to be done, or we're going to have a mess on our hands all over the world," he told CNN.

The issue has re-emerged since Nancy Reagan, shortly before her husband's death, spoke publicly in favor of resuming embryonic stem cell research. Proponents claim that it might help find cures for a number of diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"I personally believe that, in the end, the president and those who are in the administration will see that [embryonic stem cell research needs to be resumed]," Hatch said. "And we need to support this. Nancy Reagan happens to be right on this."

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Polio Outbreak Reported in Northern Nigeria

It may be nothing more than a bad memory in Western society, but polio continues to ravage areas of the world where the vaccine is either unavailable, or in one case, rejected.

The Associated Press reports that a "suspected large-scale polio outbreak" in a province of the African nation of Nigeria, where its leaders had not allowed children to get the polio vaccine.

The heavily Muslim state of Kano is one of several in northern Nigeria that had rejected the polio vaccine, which is almost universally accepted as a foolproof deterrent to polio. According to the wire service, Kano leaders believed the vaccine was part of a U.S.-led plot to cause Muslim girls to become sterile.

The AP says dozens of polio cases were reported Friday in the city of Rogo, about 60 miles southeast of the city of Kano. At least one local official is calling for the Kano state's top official to intervene.

The cases showed classic polio symptoms -- fever, fatigue, stiffness in the neck and pain in the limbs -- and some had already resulted in paralysis.

The World Health Organization has told Kano's leaders that the polio vaccine is safe, but so far there has been no official response.

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No Evidence of Mad Cow Disease in Suspected Animal

There's good news for all of those Americans firing up their barbecues this summer.

The second of two cows whose initial tests for mad cow disease had originally been inconclusive does not have the dangerous ailment, government officials say. The first cow was given a clean bill of health July 1.

According to the Associated Press, officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture cleared the animal from having bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the scientific name for mad cow disease. There has been only one confirmed case of mad cow in the United States -- last December, in a Holstein living on a farm in the state of Washington.

Mad cow disease's fatal effects on cattle can also transfer to humans. The disease affects the brain and nervous system, and people who eat meat containing the BSE protein can get Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which also is fatal.

In the 1990s and into the 21st century, hundreds of thousands of animals were destroyed in England and Europe to stem a BSE outbreak. In the United States, more than 8,500 animals have been tested under a new program designed to catch any cases before they become widespread.

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