Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.

Ex Input:
Paragraph: A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, 56, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering “cultured” meat. It’s a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way ... on the hoof. Growth of “in-vitro” or cultured meat is also under way in the Netherlands, Mironov told Reuters in an interview, but in the United States, it is science in search of funding and demand. The new National Institute of Food and Agriculture, part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, won’t fund it, the National Institutes of Health won’t fund it, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration funded it only briefly, Mironov said. “It’s classic disruptive technology,” Mironov said. “Bringing any new technology on the market, average, costs $1 billion. We don’t even have $1 million.”   Director of the Advanced Tissue Biofabrication Center in the Department of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology at the medical university, Mironov now primarily conducts research on tissue engineering, or growing, of human organs. “There’s a yuck factor when people find out meat is grown in a lab. They don’t like to associate technology with food,” said Nicholas Genovese, 32, a visiting scholar in cancer cell biology working under a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals three-year grant to run Dr. Mironov’s meat-growing lab. “But there are a lot of products that we eat today that are considered natural that are produced in a similar manner,” Genovese said. “There’s yogurt, which is cultured yeast. You have wine production and beer production. These were not produced in laboratories. Society has accepted these products.”   If wine is produced in winery, beer in a brewery and bread in a bakery, where are you going to grow cultured meat? In a “carnery,” if Mironov has his way. That is the name he has given future production facilities. He envisions football field-sized buildings filled with large bioreactors, or bioreactors the size of a coffee machine in grocery stores, to manufacture what he calls “charlem” — “Charleston engineered meat.”   “It will be functional, natural, designed food,” Mironov said. “How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture. “I believe we can do it without genes. But there is no evidence that if you add genes the quality of food will somehow suffer. Genetically modified food is already normal practice and nobody dies.”   Dr. Mironov has taken myoblasts — embryonic cells that develop into muscle tissue — from turkey and bathed them in a nutrient bath of bovine serum on a scaffold made of chitosan (a common polymer found in nature) to grow animal skeletal muscle tissue. But how do you get that juicy, meaty quality? Genovese said scientists want to add fat. And adding a vascular system so that interior cells can receive oxygen will enable the growth of steak, say, instead of just thin strips of muscle tissue. Cultured meat could eventually become cheaper than what Genovese called the heavily subsidized production of farm meat, he said, and if the public accepts cultured meat, the future holds benefits. “Thirty percent of the earth’s land surface area is associated with producing animal protein on farms,” Genovese said. “Animals require between 3 and 8 pounds of nutrient to make 1 pound of meat. It’s fairly inefficient. Animals consume food and produce waste. Cultured meat doesn’t have a digestive system. “Further out, if we have interplanetary exploration, people will need to produce food in space and you can’t take a cow with you. “We have to look to these ideas in order to progress. Otherwise, we stay static. I mean, 15 years ago who could have imagined the iPhone?” Claim: South Carolina scientist works to grow meat in lab.

Ex Output:
In a small laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical University of South Carolina, Vladimir Mironov, M.D., Ph.D., has been working for a decade to grow meat.


Ex Input:
Paragraph: The power crisis is affecting health and sanitation - because sewage treatment plants can’t run, raw sewage is pouring into the Mediterranean - and now the elderly and sick are desperately trying to handle the heat. Plastic trays and scraps of cardboard are doubling as hand-held fans. Precious piped water is hosed over children and work animals. Those trying to sleep have abandoned clammy mattresses, preferring the relative cool of bare tiled floors. Hoping to pressure the Islamist Hamas group to relinquish control of Gaza, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has reduced his administration’s payments to Israel for the electricity it supplies to Gaza. That has left the 2 million Palestinians there with only a few hours of power a day. Hospitals and other emergency facilities have made do with back-up generators. Few ordinary Palestinians have that option. A family excursion to the beach that might elsewhere have been a delight was, for Sabah Joudah, a forced decision, especially when having to put up with the sewage problems. “We came here to entertain the children, even though the sea is polluted,” she told Reuters as the dirty surf lapped close by. “It is summer and there is no electricity; no water and no fans are working in our homes. It is very tough, very tough.”   Environment officials say disruptions at sewage treatment facilities have meant more than 100,000 liters of untreated wastewater is discharged along the coast daily. Around 75 percent of the seawater is polluted. Swimming there frequently leaves children with skin inflammations and abdominal complaints, parents say. In the southern town of Khan Younis, a woman bathed her children in a bucket in the street, while a man doused his horse with water. One Khan Younis couple, the Abu Mehsens, both suffer from high blood pressure and said they were so beleaguered by the heat that simply fanning themselves could be too much effort. “When we get tired we rest for a bit before we start fanning again,” Jihan Abu Mehsen said. “We do so all day long.”    The situation has hurt Gaza’s meager retail sector, with vendors saying that sales of electrical appliances have tanked. One exception has been cheap rechargeable fans, which can be stored, with full batteries, in anticipation of the power cuts. “People have turned to alternative power, using batteries,” said appliance salesman Mahmoud Abu Hamda. “Sometimes they use trays and sometimes even the covers of kettles instead of electric fans. This has impacted us very much.” Claim: As temperatures soar, desperate Gazans try any means to beat heat.

Ex Output:
As Middle East summer temperatures soar above 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit), Gazans are struggling to stay cool amid a power crisis, with less than four hours of electricity a day and little chance to run fans and air-conditioners.


Ex Input:
Paragraph: Although it is not known how much abaloparatide will cost at this stage, the article does discuss the cost of its would-be competitor, Forteo, which costs about $2,500 a month for those without insurance. The story does a good job discussing the quantitative evidence from the study. (The few missteps, which are actually quite critical in their nature, were related to a not-entirely-adequate grasp of the study design. This we discuss in detail in a separate criterion, Quality of Evidence, below.) The story discusses several measures by which the effectiveness of abaloparatide was compared to the placebo (and Forteo), including the number of spine fractures, the number of other types of fractures, and the number of cases of hypercalcemia. And it does so using actual numbers. For example: “Fewer women on the injectable drug abaloparatide had spine fractures (0.58 percent) than women receiving a placebo (4.22 percent)…” The story lists nausea and heart palpitations among the serious side effects of both abaloparatide and Forteo. The story contains a subtle misunderstanding of the study design that leads it to misinterpret the quantitative evidence for abaloparatide and Forteo. The study’s presentation of the quantitative results suggest that the figures can be directly juxtaposed for the two drugs, when this is not actually the case. Toward the end of the research article on which the story is based, we have the following statement: “Comparison of abaloparatide vs teriparatide [Forteo] for the primary efficacy end point [cases of spine fractures] was not part of the study objectives because the study would have required a sample size of approximately 22,000 per treatment group to provide 90% power to detect the treatment difference between abaloparatide (observed rate, 0.58%) and teriparatide (observed rate, 0.84%) based on our study results.” This effectively means that comparing the 0.58% observed rate of spine fractures under abaloparatide and the 0.84% rate under Forteo, is, quite simply put, rather meaningless. The clinical trial study was never powered to discover a significant difference between the two, i.e. the study was not designed to be able to detect any meaningful difference. Indeed, the statements by Dr. Caroline Messer, interviewed in the story, and the research article’s accompanying editorial, partly reprinted at the end of the story, both emphasize that this research study does not in fact compare abaloparatide directly to Forteo. Another minor point is that Forteo had to be injected via its trademarked injection pen in the study, rather than subcutaneously as was done with abaloparatide and the placebo. This obviously has implications for the blinded nature of the study. While an ideal clinical trial is double-blinded, in this case both patients and doctors knew when Forteo was being administered. The story shares the fact that “A study based on 2010 U.S. Census data estimated that more than 3 million women between the ages of 50 and 69 have osteoporosis. A 60-year-old woman has a 44 percent lifetime risk of fracture due to low bone density.” An explanation of the term “lifetime risk” would be helpful to the reader. (In this setting, it means the probability of experiencing a fracture during the remaining years of life. In fact, the figure reported is really a “residual lifetime risk.”) Now for a slight tangent: It is great that the story chose to report an absolute risk here rather than a relative risk. This is a point we at HealthNewsReview.org try to hammer home. In a 2007 article in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, Nguyen et. al. in their article titled “Residual lifetime risk of fractures in women and men” had the following comment on relative versus absolute risk: Communication of risk in the osteoporosis field has traditionally relied on the concept of relative risk. However, relative risk can be misleading to patients and clinicians,(42) because the interpretation of a relative risk or its change is highly dependent on the baseline risk. For instance, doubling a minor risk is still minor, but doubling a common risk is alarming. It is therefore desirable that individuals who have BMD measurements be informed about their fracture probability risk category instead of their relative scores. (4) The lifetime risk estimates from this study provide such a means for communication of risk to an individual patient. Dr. Caroline Messer of the Center for Pituitary and Neuroendocrine Disorders at Lenox Hill Hospital was interviewed as an independent source. She correctly pointed out that a head-to-head trial directly comparing Forteo and abaloparatide is needed in the next step of research. The story also discloses that the research study was funded by the maker of abaloparatide, Radius Health. However, the story doesn’t point out that the study author (whom they quote extensively) also serves on a Radius Health Advisory Board. The story describes Forteo, the current dominant drug on the market for treating low bone mineral density. But see Quality of Evidence section above for how this could have been done better. The story states that abaloparatide is currently in a Phase 3 trial stage. The story does not make clear the novelty of abaloparatide, and seems to focus rather on the similarities between it and Forteo. The story does not appear to rely on a news release. Claim: Injected Drug May Help Fight Osteoporosis in Women

Ex Output:

The story reports on research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association studying an experimental drug known as abaloparatide and its ability to prevent a new vertebral fracture in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis. A standout positive for this story is its choice to report the absolute risk, rather than relative risk, of fracture due to low bone density (see Disease Mongering criterion below). Read more on why this matters. But, there are a few problems concerning the subtleties of the study design. Specifically, the research study was not powered to detect significant differences between abaloparatide and its currently-available competitor, Forteo (teriparatide). Thus, any juxtaposition of quantitative figures comparing the efficacy of the two drugs must be presented with important caveats, which we didn’t see emphasized enough in the news story. Instead, the story leads with a claim that abaloparatide reduces fracture risk “better” than the competing drug–something the study wasn’t designed to address and which is misleading. We’d note that a JAMA news release about the study, which we also reviewed, largely sidesteps this issue by avoiding any statements that directly compare the two drugs. But could the release have helped reporters out here by making a clear, unambiguous statement regarding the purpose of the study and its limitations? The researchers include such a statement in the text of the research article itself (see below under the “Evidence” criterion), and in hindsight it seems that the news release would have done well to emphasize this key nuance. Another way journalists can avoid this problem? Emphasize the findings related to the study’s primary endpoints, and always read the study’s discussion and limitations sections to find important caveats. Accompanying editorials also often have illuminating points to make, too. Given the prevalence of osteoporosis, paired with the few treatment options, a new safe, effective medication would be welcomed. Accurate distillation of the research is essential in news coverage.