CHICAGO —  An influential government-appointed medical panel is urging doctors to routinely screen all American teens for depression — a bold step that acknowledges that nearly 2 million teens are affected by this debilitating condition.

Most are undiagnosed and untreated, said the panel, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which sets guidelines for doctors on a host of health issues.

The task force recommendations appear in April's issue of the journal Pediatrics. And they go farther than the American Academy of Pediatrics' own guidance for teen depression screening.

An estimated 6 percent of U.S. teenagers are clinically depressed. Evidence shows that detailed but simple questionnaires can accurately diagnose depression in primary-care settings such as a pediatrician's office.

The task force said that when followed by treatment, including psychotherapy, screening can help improve symptoms and help kids cope. Because depression can lead to persistent sadness, social isolation, school problems and even suicide, screening to treat it early is crucial, the panel said.

The task force is an independent panel of experts convened by the federal government to establish guidelines for treatment in primary-care. Its new guidance goes beyond the pediatrics academy, which advises pediatricians to ask teen patients questions about depression. Other doctor groups advise screening only high-risk youngsters.

Because depression is so common, "you will miss a lot if you only screen high-risk groups," said Dr. Ned Calonge, task force chairman and chief medical officer for Colorado's Department of Public Health and Environment.

The group recommends research-tested screening tests even for kids without symptoms. It cited two questionnaires that focus on depression tip-offs, such as mood, anxiety, appetite and substance abuse.

Calonge stressed that the panel does not want its advice to lead to drug treatment alone, particularly antidepressants that have been linked with increased risks for suicidal thoughts. Routine depression testing should only occur if psychotherapy is also readily available, the panel said. Calonge said screening once yearly likely would be enough.

The recommendations come at a pivotal time for treatment of depression and other mental health problems in children.

Recently passed federal mental health equity legislation mandates equal coverage for mental and physical ailments in insurance plans offering both. The law is expected to prompt many more adults and children to seek mental health care.

Yet at the same time psychiatrists specializing in treating children and teens are scarce. A separate report, also released Monday in the Pediatrics journal, says primary care doctors including pediatricians and family physicians will need to get more involved in mental health care.

That report is from the pediatrics academy and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The groups say pediatricians should routinely consult with child psychiatrists, including working in the same office when possible. And it says insurers should compensate pediatricians for any mental health services they provide.

Dr. Alan Axelson, a Pittsburgh psychiatrist who co-authored the second report, praised the task force recommendations and said pediatricians can play a key role.

Because children's families often get to know their pediatricians, having those doctors offer mental health screening can help make it seem less stigmatizing, Axelson said.

Most pediatricians aren't trained to do psychotherapy, but they can prescribe depression medication and monitor patients they've referred to others for therapy, he said.

Dr. Ted Epperly, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said his group strongly supports both Pediatrics reports.

While primary care doctors have full plates just dealing with physical ailments, many recognize the importance of providing mental health services — and many already do, Epperly said.

It isn't always as time-consuming as it might seem; some screening questionnaires can be filled out by patients in the waiting room, Epperly said. Doctors can easily spot any red flags.

The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

"I'm pretty convinced that what these folks saw was the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched the crew up to the space station," said Jeff Chester of the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

Residents of the areas around Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Va., began calling 911 last night with reports of hearing a loud boom and seeing a streak of light that lit up the sky, according to news reports.

Chester heard about the incident this morning; the Naval Observatory gets plenty of reports of such fireballs and Chester investigated whether it could be a meteor or whether there were "any potential decays of space junk that were coming up," he told SPACE.com.

He checked the listing for debris that were expected to enter the lower atmosphere from their decaying orbits around this time period and found that second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched last Thursday wasslated to hit during a window that started at 8 p.m. last night.

The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi — the world's first two-time space tourist — to the International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived at the space station on Saturday.

Chester ran a satellite tracking program that showed that the rocket debris should have come down exactly in the area where the fireball was spotted.

"This is just too much of a coincidence to be coincidence," he said.

Chester said that U.S. Space Surveillance Network had not yet confirmed that this was the case, but said that he was "99 and four one-hundredths [percent] convinced that this is what it is."

The descriptions of the boom and streak of light reported by local residents were "entirely consistent with re-entering space junk, especially something this big," Chester said.

Delta airline pilot Bryce Debban reported seeing the streak of light on a flight from Boston to Raleigh-Durham when his plane was about 31,000 feet in the air.

"We saw it streak across the sky and then blow up," Debban told SPACE.com. "It was brighter than the full moon. It lit up the cockpit as if it were daylight."

James Zimbelman of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Sciences said that the explosion being caused by a re-entering rocket was very plausible.

It "sounds all too reasonable," he said.

A rocket stage would fragment and explode "just as if it were a meteorite," he said.

And the size of the rocket would explain why the explosion was seen over so wide an area.

The Soyuz rockets jettison their second stage after entering orbit in such a way that the second stage will slowly fall back to earth in a few days.

But "you can control precisely where these things are going to come down," Chester said.

It's possible that some fragments of the rocket made it to the Earth's surface, but they would likely have a couple of hundreds of miles east of Cape Hatteras, Chester said.