WASHINGTON - Scientists have mapped the cascade of genetic changes that turn normal cells in the brain and pancreas into two of the most lethal cancers. The result points to a new approach for fighting tumors and maybe even catching them sooner. Genes blamed for one person’s brain tumor were different from the culprits for the next patient, making the puzzle of cancer genetics even more complicated.

But Friday’s research also found that clusters of seemingly disparate genes all work along the same pathways. So instead of today’s hunt for drugs that target a single gene, the idea is to target entire pathways that most patients share. Think of delivering the mail to a single box at the end of the cul-de-sac instead of at every doorstep.

The three studies, published in the journals Science and Nature, mark a milestone in cancer genetics.

“This is the next wave,” said Dr. Phillip Febbo of Duke University’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, who was not involved with the new research. “What’s really important is that finding those common elements within the landscape suggests there are therapeutic interventions that can help the whole group.”

Despite 30 years of laborious work, scientists until now have found only a fraction of the genetic alterations required to cause any of the 200 diseases that collectively are called cancer. Different tumors require a different domino effect of genetic changes to arise, and to determine their severity and even which treatments will work.

The new maps do not include just mutated genes. They cite missing ones, extra ones, and overactive or underactive ones, too, in the most comprehensive look ever at human tumors.

Teams led by Johns Hopkins University examined more than 20,000 genes in tumors taken from 24 pancreatic cancer patients and 22 patients with the most dangerous brain tumor, called glioblastoma multiforme. Separately, The Cancer Genome Atlas project — a government-funded network of 18 medical centers — analyzed 600 genes in glioblastomas from 206 patients.

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A radioactive tracer that “lights up” cancer hiding inside dense breasts showed promise in its first big test against mammograms, revealing more tumors and giving fewer false alarms, doctors reported Wednesday.

The experimental method — molecular breast imaging, or MBI — would not replace mammograms for women at average risk of the disease.

But it might become an additional tool for higher risk women with a lot of dense tissue that makes tumors hard to spot on mammograms, and it could be done at less cost than an MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging. About one-fourth of women 40 and older have dense breasts.

“MBI is a promising technology” that is already in advanced testing, said Carrie Hruska, a biomedical engineer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., which has been working on it for six years.

She gave results in a telephone news briefing Wednesday and will present them later this week at an American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Washington, D.C.

Mammograms — a type of X-ray — are the chief way now to check for breast cancer. MBI uses radiation, too, but in a different way. Women are given an intravenous dose of a short-acting tracer that is absorbed more by abnormal cells than healthy ones. Special cameras collect the “glow” these cells give off, and doctors look at the picture to spot tumors.

Researchers tried both methods, on 940 women who had dense breasts and a high risk of cancer because of family history, bad genes or other reasons.

Thirteen tumors were found in 12 women — eight by MBI alone, one by mammography alone, two by both methods and two by neither. (The two missed cancers were found on subsequent annual mammograms, physical exams or other imaging tests.)

Looked at another way, MBI found 10 out of 13 tumors, missing three; mammograms detected three out of 13 tumors and missed 10. Using both methods, 11 out of 13 tumors would have been detected.

“These images are quite striking. You can see how the cancers would be hidden on the mammograms,” Hruska said.

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MUNICH, Germany - Women typically get heart disease much later than men, but not if they smoke, researchers said Tuesday.

In fact, women who smoke have heart attacks more than a dozen years earlier than women who don’t smoke, Norwegian doctors reported in a study presented to the European Society of Cardiology. For men, the gap is not so dramatic; male smokers have heart attacks about six years earlier than men who don’t smoke.

“This is not a minor difference,” said Dr. Silvia Priori, a cardiologist at the Scientific Institute in Pavia, Italy. “Women need to realize they are losing much more than men when they smoke,” she said. Priori was not connected to the research.

Dr. Morten Grundtvig and colleagues from the Innlandet Hospital Trust in Lillehammer, Norway, based their study on data from 1,784 patients admitted for a first heart attack at a hospital in Lillehammer.

Their study found that the men on average had their first heart attack at age 72 if they didn’t smoke, and at 64 if they did. Women in the study had their first heart attack at age 81 if they didn’t smoke, and at age 66 if they did.

That works out to eight and 15 years, respectively, for men and women. After adjusting for other heart risk factors like blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes, researchers found that the difference for men was about six years for women about 14 years.

Previous studies looking at a possible gender difference have been inconclusive.

Doctors have long suspected that female hormones protect women against heart disease. Estrogen is thought to raise the levels of good cholesterol as well as enabling blood vessel walls to relax more easily, thus lowering the chances of a blockage.

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WASHINGTON - The government said Thursday that the salmonella outbreak that sickened at least 1,440 people appears to be over, but its ultimate source may never be known, partly because of shortcomings in the nation’s food safety system.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration said they found strong evidence to implicate jalapeno and serrano peppers, and a farm in Mexico, in the largest outbreak of foodborne illness in a decade. Investigators were unable to clear domestic and imported tomatoes, however, although the evidence against tomatoes is weaker.

The FDA also lifted its warning that consumers avoid eating jalapeno and serrano peppers from Mexico. But officials pointedly said that doesn’t guarantee another such outbreak can be prevented.

“None of us can provide a cast-iron guarantee that salmonella Saintpaul will not re-emerge,” said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA’s food safety chief. “We have not identified the total source of this.”

FDA and CDC officials said a number of steps are needed to improve the safety of fresh produce, even as the government and the medical community are urging consumers to eat more fruits and vegetables for better nutrition.

Among those measures: Standard procedures and more funding to allow state laboratories to test samples of suspected pathogens more rapidly. Congressional action to give the FDA authority to impose produce safety regulations. And industry action to develop a faster system for tracing back to the farm any produce items suspected in an outbreak.

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CHICAGO - A new TV commercial shows kids eating hot dogs in a school cafeteria and one little boy’s haunting lament: “I was dumbfounded when the doctor told me I have late-stage colon cancer.”

It’s a startling revelation in an ad that vilifies one of America’s most beloved, if maligned, foods, while stoking fears about a dreaded disease.

But the boy doesn’t have cancer. Neither do two other kids in the ad who claim to be afflicted.

The commercial’s pro-vegetarian sponsors say it’s a dramatization that highlights research linking processed meats, including hot dogs, with higher odds of getting colon cancer.

But that connection is based on studies of adults, not children, and the increased risk is slight, even if you ate a hot dog a day. While compelling, it isn’t conclusive.

So what exactly is the truth about hot dogs?

The 33-second ad launched last month in several U.S. cities provides the perfect opportunity to separate fact from fiction about this mysterious yet so familiar meat. It is to run in September in Chicago and Denver.

The bottom line from several nutritionists familiar with the ad is this: Hot dogs aren’t exactly a “health food,” but eating one every now and then probably won’t hurt you.

“My concern about this campaign is it’s giving the indication that the occasional hot dog in the school lunch is going to increase cancer risk,” said Colleen Doyle, the American Cancer Society’s nutrition director. “An occasional hot dog isn’t going to increase that risk.”

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WASHINGTON - Infections may play a bigger role in premature birth than doctors have thought, says a new study that found almost one in seven women in preterm labor harbored bacteria or fungi in their amniotic fluid.

It’s a small study, and it doesn’t prove that the germs triggered the early labor.

But Monday’s research used specialized molecular testing to uncover microbes that ordinary methods miss, and thus uncovered more women with simmering infections than previously estimated.

The more heavily infected the amniotic fluid, the more likely the woman was to deliver a younger, sicker baby, researchers reported in PLoS One, the online journal of the Public Library of Science.

“We don’t think any organisms belong in the amniotic sac,” said Stanford University microbiologist Dr. David Relman, the study’s senior author. “You’d have to presume there’s something wrong.”

More than half a million babies a year are born premature, before completion of 37 weeks of pregnancy. It’s a toll that has steadily risen for two decades, yet doctors don’t know the cause of most preterm births or how to prevent them. Every extra week in the womb helps. Those born before 32 weeks face the greatest risk of death or devastating disabilities, but even babies born a few weeks early can face serious problems.

Certain infections, such as vaginal or urinary tract infections, are known to raise the risk of premature birth, presumably by causing inflammation that in turn triggers labor.

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LONDON - Transplanting faces may seem like science fiction, but doctors say the experimental surgeries could one day become routine. Two of the world’s three teams that have done partial face transplants reported Friday that their techniques were surprisingly effective, though complications exist and more work is still needed.

"There is no reason to think these face transplants would not be as common as kidney or liver transplants one day," said Dr. Laurent Lantieri, one of the French doctors who operated on a man severely disfigured by a genetic disease.

In Friday’s issue of the British medical journal Lancet, Lantieri and colleagues reported on their patient’s status one year after the transplant. Chinese doctors also reported on their patient, two years after his surgery.

Last year, the French team operated on a 29-year-old man with tumors that blurred his features in a face that looked almost monstrous. They transplanted a new lower face from a donor, giving the patient new cheeks, a nose and mouth. Six months later, he could smile and blink.

The Chinese patient had part of his face ripped off by a bear. Surgeons in Xian gave him a new nose, upper lip and cheek from a donor. After a few months, he could eat, drink and talk normally, and returned home to Yunnan province in southwest China.

The patients were not identified although photos were included in the reports.

As is the case with all transplants, doctors use immune-suppressing drugs to prevent the recipient’s body from attacking the donated tissue. In both face transplants, the patients started rejecting the transplanted tissue more than once. Their doctors solved the problem by juggling their medications.

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NEW YORK - A report on three heart transplants involving babies is focusing attention on a touchy issue in the organ donation field: When and how can someone be declared dead?

For decades, organs have typically been removed only after doctors determine that a donor’s brain has completely stopped working. In the case of the infants, all three were on life support and showed little brain function, but they didn’t meet the criteria for brain death.

With their families’ consent, the newborns were taken off ventilators and surgeons in Denver removed their hearts minutes after they stopped beating. The hearts were successfully transplanted, and the babies who got the hearts survived.

"It seemed like there was an unmet need in two situations," said Dr. Mark Boucek, who led the study at Children’s Hospital in Denver. "Recipients were dying while awaiting donor organs. And we had children dying whose family wanted to donate, and we weren’t able to do it."

The procedure — called donation after cardiac death — is being encouraged by the federal government, organ banks and others as a way to make more organs available and give more families the option to donate.

But the approach raises legal and ethical issues because it involves children and because, according to critics, it violates laws governing when organs may be removed.

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CHICAGO - You can look great in a swimsuit and still be a heart attack waiting to happen. And you can also be overweight and otherwise healthy. A new study suggests that a surprising number of overweight people — about half — have normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels, while an equally startling number of trim people suffer from some of the ills associated with obesity.

The first national estimate of its kind bolsters the argument that you can be hefty but still healthy, or at least healthier than has been believed.

The results also show that stereotypes about body size can be misleading, and that even "less voluptuous" people can have risk factors commonly associated with obesity, said study author MaryFran Sowers, a University of Michigan obesity researcher.

"We’re really talking about taking a look with a very different lens" at weight and health risks, Sowers said.

In the study, about 51 percent of overweight adults, or roughly 36 million people nationwide, had mostly normal levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, blood fats called triglycerides and blood sugar.

Almost one-third of obese adults, or nearly 20 million people, also were in this healthy range, meaning that none or only one of those measures was abnormal.

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MEXICO CITY - Jorge Saavedra’s moment of truth came in the middle of an impassioned speech to 5,000 people about the paltry amount of money being spent to stop the spread of AIDS among gay men.

The Mexican federal official paused, then said publicly for the first time that he was gay.

As he held up a photo of himself with his partner, the crowd applauded wildly. Afterward, men from Africa and India congratulated him with tears in their eyes.

"They told me that I was a hero, and that they wished they could do the same in their countries," said Saavedra, who is infected with HIV and also heads the AIDS prevention program in a country where many gay men live in denial.

Saavedra’s coming out on Tuesday at the International AIDS Conference sent a powerful message to the world: Homophobia must be stamped out if AIDS is to be controlled.

Fewer people are dying from AIDS, but new HIV infections among gay and bisexual men in many countries are rising at alarming rates.

Yet less than 1 percent of the $669 million reported in global prevention spending targets men who have sex with men, according to UNAIDS figures from 2006, the latest available data.

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