AP/Courtesy Giarratano Family

All in the family: Nino Giarratano (left), the head baseball coach at the University of San Francisco, joins hands with his father, Mickey Giarratano, after the transplant of a kidney from son to father at Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver last year.

The shortage of organs for transplant continues to grow, despite years of work to get more donors on board.

Facebook jumped in this month by making organ-donation status something you could add to your profile. And the social media giant made it easy to connect with a registry to sign up as a donor.

Federal law bans payments for organs. But given the need, we wondered what Americans thought about compensation for three kinds of donations that can be made while people are alive: kidneys, bone marrow and a portion of liver big enough to help someone whose liver is failing.

So we asked 3,000 adults across the country as part of the NPR-Thomson Reuters Health Poll, and here's what they told us.

Enlarge Shashank Bengali/MCT/Landov

A mother and child wait to receive treatment at the HIV clinic in Nyagasambu, Rwanda, in Feb. 2008. The clinic was built by the Washington-based Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation with a grant from the PEPFAR program.

Shashank Bengali/MCT/Landov

A mother and child wait to receive treatment at the HIV clinic in Nyagasambu, Rwanda, in Feb. 2008. The clinic was built by the Washington-based Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation with a grant from the PEPFAR program.

U.S. government spending to fight HIV/AIDS in developing countries is also preventing death from other diseases, a new study finds.

Some experts worry the billions of dollars the United States spends to treat people with HIV in poor countries may crowd out prevention and treatment of other illnesses.

But the findings of a study just published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest the opposite. The analysis indicates the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, has had substantial spillover benefits.

Stanford's Dr. Eran Bendavid, lead author of the study, says deaths from all causes dropped nearly 20 percent over five years in nine African countries where PEPFAR operates.

iStockphoto.com

She's not alone.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure I've ever walked in my sleep. There's a family story that I'd like to label fiction about a somnolent bathroom run that ended in a closet. But if it ever happened, I don't remember it.

Turns out sleepwalking is pretty common though. At some point in life, 29 percent of adults in the U.S. walk in their sleep, according to a study published in the journal Neurology.

Some 3.6 percent of adults had engaged in "nocturnal wandering," as the researchers put it, in the year before they answered questions during an interview for the study. One percent had two or more episodes of sleepwalking a month in the previous year.

Sleepwalking by kids is "very common," with some studies finding as many as 30 percent of children strolling around while they doze, the researchers note. The behavior tends to decrease with age.

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Taking a pill for cancer can cost patients more than getting chemotherapy by IV.

If you've got cancer, chances are you'd rather take a pill to fight the cancer cells than sit for hours hooked up to an IV line as the chemotherapy drips slowly into you.

The difficulty is, many of the new cancer pills, which often target cancer cells for destruction but leave healthy cells intact, are pricey, costing tens of thousands of dollars for a course of treatment. And how some insurers pay for treatments means that pills can wind up costing a patient more than chemotherapy given by IV.

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia now require private health plans to cover cancer-fighting pills, if they're available, to the same degree and without charging patients more than they would for traditional intravenous infusion therapy, according to the National Patient Advocate Foundation.

So, for example, a health plan that has a $1,500 limit on out-of-pocket spending for outpatient services like IV chemotherapy can't charge more than that annually for their treatment pills.

But Medicare beneficiaries don't benefit from these laws.

Enlarge Ross D. Franklin/AP

Arizona state Sen. Nancy Barto, R-Phoenix, listens during a special budget briefing at the state Capitol in October 2008. Barto sponsored a new law that prohibits wrongful birth lawsuits. She says the bill "sends the message that all life is worth protecting."

Ross D. Franklin/AP

Arizona state Sen. Nancy Barto, R-Phoenix, listens during a special budget briefing at the state Capitol in October 2008. Barto sponsored a new law that prohibits wrongful birth lawsuits. She says the bill "sends the message that all life is worth protecting."

Several states, including Kansas and New Jersey, are debating so-called "wrongful birth" laws that would prevent parents from suing a doctor who fails to warn them about fetal problems.

Abortion rights activists say the laws give doctors the right to withhold information so women don't have abortions.

In Suffern, N.Y., Sharon and Steven Hoffman's son, Jake, was born with Tay-Sachs, a genetic disease that mainly affects Jewish families and is usually fatal by age 4 or 5.

"There's no treatment. There's no cure. There's nothing," Sharon says.

Enlarge Rajanish Kakade/AP

Participants carry a rainbow flag during a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender parade in Mumbai, India.

Rajanish Kakade/AP

Participants carry a rainbow flag during a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender parade in Mumbai, India.

It's just after nightfall as Anandrag Davinder, an outreach worker among Mumbai's mostly hidden community of gay men, wanders down a dark alley beside a busy railway station in Mumbai. His stop is a squalid row of urinal buildings where gay men go to meet, hidden from public view. The stench inside is overwhelming.

"This is a loo. This is a cruising center," Davinder says, stepping into the crowded, nearly pitch-black room. "All the gays are standing here only and saying, 'I like these guys. I want to do sex with this person.' "

The men here are among what Davinder calls India's "key population" — those most at risk of contracting HIV. He and his colleague, Husefa Saigoonwala, come here every week to pass out handfuls of condoms.

Enlarge The White House/Getty Images

Reaction to President Obama's bombshell that he now supports gay marriage ran the gamut from profound to lighthearted.

The White House/Getty Images

Reaction to President Obama's bombshell that he now supports gay marriage ran the gamut from profound to lighthearted.

President Obama's pronouncement last week in favor of same-sex marriage has no legal effect on employers' decisions on whether to offer benefits to workers' domestic partners.

But some advocates say it could reinforce a decade-long trend toward coverage.

Last year, a little more than half of employers offered health benefits for domestic partners, according to a nationally representative sample of about 3,000 employers surveyed by benefit consultant Mercer. That's up from a little less than one-third in 2010.

The biggest factors driving that change are employers' views on whether such benefits help them attract and retain desirable workers.

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Times are tough for young people. Unemployment is high, and college costs are soaring.

For those who've been diagnosed with autism, the challenges of life after high school are even steeper, according to a study just published in the journal Pediatrics.

Within the first six years of getting out of high school, only a little more than one-third of young people previously diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, had gone to college, and only a slim majority — 55 percent — had held paying jobs.

The first two years after high school are particularly hard, the researchers found, with less than half of the young people with an ASD having had any work.

Enlarge Sean Locke/iStockphoto.com

Doctors often overlook taking a child's blood pressure during routine visits.

Sean Locke/iStockphoto.com

Doctors often overlook taking a child's blood pressure during routine visits.

There have been hints that the obesity epidemic's rise has slowed a bit among certain populations, but for the most part, it continues to dominate American health. One third of children and teenagers are now overweight or obese. And researchers forecast as many as half of our nation's population could be obese — not overweight but obese — by 2030.

With obesity comes a host of health-related problems: diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and even certain cancers. Perhaps most worrisome of all, pediatricians report seeing the beginning of these diseases — previously considered problems among adults only — in children as young as 3.

And this is why the American Academy of Pediatrics and federal health officials recommend that doctors routinely screen children for high blood pressure. But diagnosing hypertension in children is more complicated than it is among adults.

"In adults, anything over 140 over 90 is considered abnormal," says family physician Dr. Margaret Riley with the University of Michigan Medical School. Not so for kids.

Dick Blau/TimeSlips

TimeSlips is a program based on the idea that storytelling can be therapeutic for people with dementia.

Ask family members of someone with Alzheimer's or another dementia: Trying to talk with a loved one who doesn't even remember exactly who they are can be very frustrating.

But here at a senior center in Seattle, things are different.

On one recent day, 15 elderly people were forming a circle. The room is typical — linoleum floors, cellophane flowers on the windows, canes and wheelchairs, and walkers lined up against the wall.

Linda White is leading a session based on a program called TimeSlips. The idea is to show photos to people with memory loss, and get them to imagine what's going on — not to try to remember anything, but to make up a story.