A German court ruled for the first time Tuesday that seriously ill patients may grow their own marijuana for medical purposes in certain cases.

The administrative court in the western city of Cologne said that while cannabis remained illegal for general use in Germany, it may be cultivated at home by some patients with medical permits for the drug.

A massive gene trawl has linked over 100 DNA coding mutations to schizophrenia, yielding critical clues about what causes the illness and possibly how to treat it, scientists said Tuesday. 

Using more than 80,000 genetic samples from schizophrenia patients and healthy volunteers, an international team of researchers found 128 variants -- 83 of them new -- associated with a higher risk for people who carry them.

Researchers in Saudi Arabia said Tuesday they have found genetic traces of the dangerous Middle East respiratory virus, MERS-CoV, in the air of a barn that housed a sick camel.

The study in mBio, the journal of the American Society for Microbiology, calls for further research to determine if the potentially fatal virus can be transmitted through the air.

An outbreak of encephalitis has killed 60 people in two weeks in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, a top health official has said, calling the situation "alarming'.

Hundreds of mainly children die across India each year from the mosquito-borne virus, but West Bengal is not normally one of the worst-hit states.

The elusive quest for an HIV cure received a boost at the world AIDS conference Tuesday as scientists said they had forced the virus out of a hiding place where it had lurked after being suppressed by drugs.

The experiment, carried out with six HIV-infected volunteers, is an important advance in the so-called "kick-and-kill" approach for a cure, they said.

An experimental cocktail of three drugs can dramatically shorten the time it takes to treat patients infected with TB strains that are hard to cure with conventional antibiotics, according to research presented Monday at the world AIDS forum.

Dubbed the PaMZ regimen, the drugs killed more TB bacteria than standard therapy and at a faster rate in a so-called Phase IIb trial, usually the penultimate step in vetting new treatments for safety and effectiveness, investigators said.

The monkey version of HIV can take refuge from anti-AIDS drugs within days of entering the body, a study said Sunday, dampening hopes for a human cure.

In the heart of Gaza City, as its citizens again find themselves under fire from Israeli airstrikes and artillery, the wounded and their wailing families stream into Shifa Hospital without end.

Shifa, Gaza's largest hospital, only has an 11-bed emergency room and six operating theaters. Yet amid power cuts and among the screams of the bereaved, doctors at the 600-bed facility have become masters of improvisation, forced by the seemingly unending conflict engulfing the coastal strip to care for the wounded.

Shanghai has shut a factory of U.S. food provider OSI Group for selling out-of-date meat to restaurant giants including McDonald's and KFC, authorities said Monday in China's latest food safety scandal.

Shanghai television, which reported the original allegations, said that workers at the OSI China plant mixed expired meat with the fresh product and deliberately misled quality inspectors from McDonald's.

The rate of HIV diagnoses in the United States has dropped more than 30 percent over the past decade, but is on the rise among certain gay men, researchers said Saturday.

Men who have sex with men and who are aged between 13 and 24 saw the biggest rise -- a 132.5 percent increase in the rate of HIV diagnoses -- said the report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.