[jQuery] load() and utf-8 encoding, nothing seems to work...

[jQuery] load() and utf-8 encoding, nothing seems to work...

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;">I've been googling around but found no answer that works for me.
I'm loading some content from a PHP script using the load() function inside an html document that already has the utf-8 encoding meta tag. I suposed that the rule at the head of the container document will affect all loaded contents, but it doesn't.
The PHP I'm loading is using a switch to serve different contents, for every case I have open php tags like this:
case '1':
?>
Here comes the choosen HTML contents
<?
break
In my PHP I have also placed a header to indicate the content is utf-8:
header ('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
But maybe just because the final content is out of php tags maybe it is not affecting the content...
I have also tried setting the AJAX defaults:
    $.ajaxSetup({

        scriptCharset: "utf-8" ,
        contentType: "text/html; charset=utf-8"
    });
But not even like that...
How can I fix that?
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