A new Obama administration rule requires insurers to cover treatment for mental health and substance abuse no differently than they do for physical illnesses.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says nearly 60 percent of people with mental health conditions and nearly 90 percent with substance abuse disorders don't receive the treatment they need.

Rickets, the childhood disease that once caused an epidemic of bowed legs and curved spines during the Victorian era, is making a shocking comeback in 21st-century Britain.

Rickets results from a severe deficiency of vitamin D, which helps the body absorb calcium. Rickets was historically considered to be a disease of poverty among children who toiled in factories during the Industrial Revolution, and some experts have hypothesized it afflicted literary characters like Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."

Saudi Arabia has recorded two new cases of the MERS virus, the health ministry said on Saturday, a day after authorities in neighboring Qatar reported one new case.

Saudi Arabia accounts for a full 52 of 127 deaths worldwide from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) so far, while Qatar accounts for two.

U.S. regulators took steps to eliminate artery-clogging trans fats from processed foods like margarine, microwave popcorn and frozen pizza, saying that partially hydrogenated oils are not safe to eat.

The proposal by the Food and Drug Administration aims to reduce heart disease and deaths by requiring packaged food-makers to choose safer mono and polyunsaturated fats.

A French family who came to the United States for medical treatment said they were stranded in Chicago after British Airways determined their son was too fat to fly.

Kevin Chenais, 22, spent a year and a half at the Mayo Clinic for treatment of a hormone disorder which led him to weigh 500 pounds.

President Barack Obama apologized Thursday, saying he was sorry for Americans who had health insurance plans canceled because of his new law, even though he had promised they would not.

Obama's mea culpa came amid a controversy over his repeated assurances that if citizens liked their existing coverage, they could keep it under his signature health care reform, dubbed Obamacare.

An outbreak of polio in Syria poses a threat to Europe, where the crippling and potentially fatal disease was declared eradicated in 2002, doctors warned on Friday.

Europe is exposed because some countries have low rates of innoculation, which lowers "herd immunity", or protection through community-wide vaccination, a pair of German epidemiologists warned in The Lancet.

U.S. regulators on Thursday took steps to ban trans fat from processed foods like microwave popcorn and frozen pizzas, saying the artery-clogging oils are not safe for humans to eat.

"Partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs), the primary dietary source of artificial trans fat in processed foods, are not 'generally recognized as safe' for use in food," the Food and Drug Administration said in a statement.

Scientists said Wednesday they had found an "invisibility cloak" that allows the AIDS virus to lurk unnoticed in human cells after infection and replicate without triggering the immune system.

And they managed to "uncloak" the virus with an experimental drug in lab-grown cells -- a feat that may lead to new and better HIV treatments, the team wrote in the journal Nature.

Scientists said Wednesday they may have found the earliest signs yet of autism in infants -- babies as young as two months starting to evade other people's eyes.

Eye-evasion has long been regarded as a hallmark of autism, but its potential value as an early diagnostic tool had not been explored before, a team of researchers wrote in the journal Nature.