MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, it's time to check in with the doctor. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, our in-house doctor, is going to tell you about a lot of things related to the medical world this past week which you might have missed, including some interesting new news which may lead to a bypass of the bypass.</s>SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): New heart bypass surgery is allowing doctors to bypass opening the chest. Instead, catheters are inserted into the leg that transform coronary veins into arteries. Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital say it could offer hope for patients with heart conditions too severe to undergo traditional bypass surgery or angioplasty. Plus, they say it's safer and less painful. Results from the first procedure are in the journal "Circulation." A drug to help nicotine fiends will be used in clinical trials next year. A Maryland pharmaceutical company says it has developed a vaccine that would keep nicotine from reaching the brain. That would prevent the production of the feel good chemicals linked to addiction. If the drug works, it would help people trying to break the habit by allowing them to smoke a cigarette without becoming re-addicted. However, the vaccine would do nothing to prevent the effects that smoking has on the lungs. And 20 years after U.S. health officials issued their first report on what was later called AIDS, the government has released a new study showing the progress that's been made fighting the disease. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of new HIV cases dropped from 150,000 a year in the 1980s to 40,000 a year in the 1990s. Health officials attribute the decline to education and lifestyle changes. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.
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