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.

Spain said Wednesday that a woman who just returned from Saudi Arabia has been infected by the MERS coronavirus in the country's first case of the deadly disease.

The patient, who was born in Morocco but lives in Spain, is receiving treatment at a Madrid hospital and is in a "stable" condition, the health ministry said in a statement.

Cynthia Carrion-Norton flits high-heeled around the Philippine capital with energy levels belying her years, thankful for a controversial treatment she highly recommends to fellow sixty-somethings.

Carrion-Norton, 66, a member of the Philippine Olympic Committee and a former undersecretary for medical tourism, credits her vitality to adult stem cell therapy.

A heated debate on proposals to legalize euthanasia for minors in Belgium, one of the few countries to allow it for adults, intensified on Wednesday with supporters and opponents pressing their case.

Proposed legislation would allow the euthanasia of minors so long as they are judged capable of deciding for themselves -- a move favored by three quarters of Belgians, according to a recent opinion poll.

Older men treated with testosterone run a higher risk of death, heart attacks and strokes, according to a study out Tuesday suggesting the hormone therapy may need to be reconsidered.

The researchers followed more than 8,700 men who had low levels of the hormone, of whom 1,223 took a testosterone supplement for a median period of around two years.