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WASHINGTON – Drink a milkshake and the pleasure center in your brain gets a hit of happy — unless you're overweight. It sounds counterintuitive. But scientists who watched young women savor milkshakes inside a brain scanner concluded that when the brain doesn't sense enough gratification from food, people may overeat to compensate.

The small but first-of-a-kind study even could predict who would pile on pounds during the next year: Those who harbored a gene that made their brain's yum factor even more sluggish.

"The more blunted your response to the milkshake taste, the more likely you are to gain weight," said Dr. Eric Stice, a senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute who led the work, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science. more >>

WASHINGTON – Drug-resistant staph bacteria picked up in ordinary community settings are increasingly acquiring "superbug" powers and causing far more serious illnesses than they have in the past, doctors reported Monday. These widespread germs used to be easier to treat than the dangerous forms of staph found in hospitals and nursing homes.

"Until recently we rarely thought of it as a problem among healthy people in the community," said Dr. Rachel Gorwitz of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Now, the germs causing outbreaks in schools, on sports teams and in other social situations are posing a growing threat. A CDC study found that at least 10 percent of cases involving the most common community strain were able to evade the antibiotics typically used to treat them. more >>

Your 9-year-old's eyes hurt during homework? Your teen's a slow reader plagued with headaches? They may have a common yet often missed vision problem: Eyes that don't turn together properly to read.

As many as one of every 20 students have some degree of what eye doctors call "convergence insufficiency," or CI, where eye muscles must work harder to focus up-close. And those standard vision screenings administered by schools and pediatricians won't catch it — they stress distance vision.

When symptoms such as eye strain, headaches, double vision or reading problems trigger the right diagnosis, doctors prescribe any of a hodgepodge of exercises designed to strengthen eye coordination. Now a major government study finally offers evidence for the best approach: Eye training performed in a doctor's office for 12 weeks. more >>

WASHINGTON – The government has approved the first noninvasive brain stimulator to treat depression — a device that beams magnetic pulses through the skull.

If it sounds like science-fiction, well, those woodpecker-like pulses trigger small electrical charges that spark brain cells to fire. Yet it doesn't cause the risks of surgically implanted electrodes or the treatment of last resort, shock therapy.

Called transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS, this gentler approach isn't for everyone. The Food and Drug Administration approved Neuronetics Inc.'s NeuroStar therapy specifically for patients who had no relief from their first antidepressant, offering them a different option than trying pill after pill. more >>

WASHINGTON (AP)- Experts at an early August international AIDS conference in Mexico City were full of praise for the United States for having reversed a 15-year-old law banning HIV-positive people from entering the country.

But nearly two months after President Bush signed that act into law, his administration has yet to take the steps needed to put the new law into practice, and lawmakers and advocacy groups are wondering what is going on.

"We write to encourage you to act quickly to remove HIV from the list of communicable diseases of public health significance and end the HIV travel and immigration ban," Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Gordon Smith, R-Ore., main backers of the measure in the Senate, wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt last month. more >>

WASHINGTON (AP)- First Bari Martz's fingers turned blue. Then she started gasping for breath, and her joints stiffened so that she couldn't even open her hands. Doctors diagnosed scleroderma, part of an insidious family of diseases where the immune system attacks a patient's own body, sometimes enough to kill.

Worsening rapidly, the Florida woman took a gamble: Doctors stored stem cells from her blood and then wiped out her faulty immune system. Her reinfused stem cells seem to have let a healthy new immune system take root, stopping more damage and, nearly two years later, letting her lungs and joints heal enough for better function.

Studies here and in Europe are aiming to reset immunity for patients with severe scleroderma — work that, if successful, could cast new light on numerous autoimmune diseases, from lupus to multiple sclerosis. more >>