Just three days after announcing it would no longer fund cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood, the pink-ribboned breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure abruptly reversed course today. But the Komen foundation's actions still leave many questions unanswered — not to mention a public relations challenge.

In a brief statement posted on the group's website, Komen founder and CEO Nancy Brinker apologized "for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives." She explained that Komen would revise the criteria that earlier in the week appeared to disqualify Planned Parenthood from receiving almost $700,000 in grants for breast cancer screening.

Komen's original justification for excluding Planned Parenthood from future funding was that the group was the subject of a congressional investigation. But in a conference call Thursday, Brinker insisted that the foundation's new funding guidelines had less to do with that and more to do with the fact that Planned Parenthood doesn't perform mammograms.

"Wherever possible, we want to grant to the provider that is actually providing lifesaving mammograms," she said.

The statement reversing course doesn't actually address the question of what kind of services Planned Parenthood provides; the women's health service does about 700,000 breast exams each year.

But Komen has backed down on how it defines an investigation. Now organizations can only be excluded from funding if those investigations are "criminal and conclusive in nature and not political," the statement said.

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High school football players have changes in their brain function long before they have recognizable signs of a concussion, according to a new study.

The more hits a player got, the more brain function changed. The findings support the growing belief that a concussion comes as the result of a succession of insults, not just one bad hit.

"I think what you're seeing here is the sum total of what happens throughout the season," says Eric Nauman, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University and lead author of the study.

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After days of controversy, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has said it will continue funding for Planned Parenthood.

Earlier this week, the foundation moved to discontinue funding of breast cancer screening by Planned Parenthood. The Associated Press reported the change came because of a new Komen policy forbidding grants to organizations under official investigation.

Subsequently, Komen said the change wasn't driven by politics but was instead an efficiency move.

Founder and CEO Nancy G. Brinker explained the latest decision and the changes in a statement attributed to her and the group's board. Here's an excerpt (with original emphasis in bold):

"We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives.

The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities."

Komen's decision to halt funding led to an outpouring of support for Planned Parenthood, including a jump in donations. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for one, pledged up to $250,000 of his own money to the organization to help make up for a drop in funding for breast cancer screening.

Update 12:23 p.m. EST: Planned Parenthood released a statement from Cecile Richards, president of the group, saying, "We are now heartened that we can continue to work in partnership" with Komen. "We are enormously grateful that the Komen Foundation has clarified its grantmaking criteria, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Komen partners, leaders and volunteers."

Despite more than 20 years of recommendations that health workers get flu shots, the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show more than a third don't comply.

The voluntary approach to reducing the risk that workers will transmit flu to patients has fallen short.

So consumer and business groups met in Washington Thursday to show their support for a recommendation from the National Business Group on Health that hospitals require all health care workers to be vaccinated annually against the flu.

"We believe that patients have the right to assume that health care personnel, themselves, will take all reasonable measures to reduce and avoid transmission of preventable diseases including the flu," said Helen Darling, president and CEO of the NBGH. "I think we, as people, assume that after all, they're our caretakers and we look to them for care and treatment."

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Many addicts inherit a brain that has trouble just saying no to drugs.

A study in Science finds that cocaine addicts have abnormalities in areas of the brain involved in self-control. And these abnormalities appear to predate any drug abuse.

The study, done by a team at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., looked at 50 pairs of siblings. One member of each pair was a cocaine addict. The other had no history of drug abuse.

But brain scans showed that both siblings had brains unlike those of typical people, says Karen Ersche, the study's lead author.

"The fibers that connect the different parts of the brain were less efficient in both," she says.

These fibers connect areas involved in emotion with areas that tell us when to stop doing something, Ersche says. When the fibers aren't working efficiently, she says, it takes longer for a "stop" message to get through.

And sure enough, another experiment done by Ersche's team showed that both siblings took longer than a typical person to respond to a signal telling them to stop performing a task. In other words, they had less self-control.

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Leaders of the breast-cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure tried in vain Thursday to contain the controversy stemming from its decision to end its grants to Planned Parenthood. But it's becoming clearer that Planned Parenthood has the upper hand in the battle.

While Komen officials argued that it wasn't pressure from anti-abortion groups that led them to end their years-long relationship with Planned Parenthood, outraged supporters of the reproductive health organization were rushing to make up the lost funds.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for one, pledged up to $250,000 of his personal fortune to the organization, putting it well on its way to making up the $680,000 it had been getting from Komen. That's in addition to more than $400,000 Planned Parenthood says it racked up in the first day after the funding cutoff was made public.

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The World Health Organization estimates that 655,000 people died of malaria in 2010. But a new report says no, the real total is twice as high — 1.24 million people.

If the new numbers are right, it means there's little chance that malaria deaths can be cut to near-zero by 2015, just three years from now. That's the official goal set last year by the World Health Organization.

"We estimate that if decreases from the peak year of 2004 continue, malaria mortality will decrease to less than 100,000 deaths only after 2020," write Christopher Murray and his colleagues in this week's edition of The Lancet.

The group does ratify what a Lancet editorial calls the "phenomenally successful" campaign that has reduced malaria deaths in Africa by 30 percent since the 2004 peak.

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Schools worried about concussions increasingly use computerized tests to tell if a student athlete has a brain injury. But new research says those tests aren't reliable enough to diagnose concussion, or to tell if it's safe to return to play.

The researchers looked at research on one computerized neuropsychologist test, called ImPACT, that is widely used by colleges and high schools. (Here's one NPR story on how high schools use ImPACT to assess concussions.)

It's also used by the National Football League and National Hockey League.

But very few studies have been done on the reliability of these tests in real-world situations.

So Lester Mayers, a sports medicine doctor at Pace University in Pleasantville, N.Y., and Tom Redick, an assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University in Columbus, Ind., surveyed the data. They weren't happy with what they found. They say computerized tests aren't reliable enough to serve as the sole measure of brain health.

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