West Africa still has a long way to go to beat Ebola, the United Nations' outgoing Ebola mission chief said Friday.

"I think the response has been successful but we have a long way to go," Anthony Banbury, head of the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) said, warning of an "epic battle" still ahead to control the spread of the virus.

U.S. scientists encouraged 20 obese people to eat extra fast food for several months, and found that about a quarter stayed in good health despite the additional pounds they gained.

The study in the January 2 edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation was led by a team of scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri.

Randy Gross hopes a new law allowing children into Illinois' medical marijuana program will reunite his family, nearly a year after his wife moved to Colorado so their son could receive a controversial treatment to ease his epileptic seizures.

Gross lives and works in Illinois. His wife, Nicole, moved with their two sons so their 8-year-old could legally swallow a quarter-teaspoon of marijuana oil each day. While the medical evidence is thin, some parents — including the Grosses — say marijuana works for their children and they're willing to experiment.

The tequila sure looks real, so do the beer taps. Inside the hospital at the National Institutes of Health, researchers are testing a possible new treatment to help heavy drinkers cut back — using a replica of a fully stocked bar.

The idea: Sitting in the dimly lit bar-laboratory should cue the volunteers' brains to crave a drink, and help determine if the experimental pill counters that urge.

Cancer is often caused by the "bad luck" of random mutations that arise when cells divide, not family history or environmental causes, U.S. researchers said Thursday.

The study in the January 2 edition of the journal Science was led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and based on a statistical model that includes many types of cancer in a range of human tissues.

An Italian doctor who contracted Ebola in west Africa has recovered from the disease after undergoing experimental treatment, local media reported on Thursday.

The 50-year-old from Sicily, who has not been named, has been in isolation at Rome's Spallanzani institute since he was evacuated from Sierra Leone in mid-November.

The International Monetary Fund is under mounting pressure to cancel the debts of the three poor West African countries hit hardest by Ebola, as their economies stall under the fallout from the disease.

The calls for a debt alleviation for Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are coming not only from anti-poverty organizations.

Hong Kong culled thousands of chickens Wednesday after the potentially deadly H7N9 bird flu virus was discovered in poultry imported from China, days after a woman was admitted to hospital with the disease.

Authorities found the virus in samples taken from 120 chickens imported from the nearby Chinese city of Huizhou and slaughtered nearly 19,000 birds, including 11,800 chickens.

Most Australian states and territories are set to ban commercial sunbeds from Thursday, in a crackdown on artificial tanning in a country that has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world.

The ban -- which comes into force in the states of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland and in the Australian Capital Territory on January 1 -- will make Australia the second nation after Brazil to impose such a restriction, campaigners said.

Insect-eating bats that inhabited a hollow tree in a remote village in Guinea may have been the source of the world's biggest Ebola epidemic, scientists said on Tuesday.

More than 20,000 cases of Ebola, with at least 7,800 deaths, have been recorded by the World Health Organization (WHO) since a two-year-old boy died in the village of Meliandou in December 2013.