Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

Ex Input:
With a bumper crop of blacklegged ticks possible this season, researchers in a Lyme disease-plagued part of New York’s Hudson Valley are tackling tick problems across entire neighborhoods with fungal sprays and bait boxes. The $8.8 million, five-year project aims to find out if treating 24 neighborhoods in Dutchess County for ticks, also known as deer ticks, can significantly reduce cases of Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses. “We want to do a better job and actually remove the threat from the neighborhoods, from the places where people are actually exposed to infected ticks,” said Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of New York City. Dutchess County is a patchwork of forests, rolling farmland and thick residential developments that has long been a hotbed of Lyme disease. Tick checks are a common end-of-day routine here, as are inspections for the red, target-shaped rashes associated with tick bites. People spray on tick repellents, treat their clothes with insecticide and even spray their yards. But Ostfeld notes that spraying individual lawns has not proved effective in fighting Lyme disease. So he’s scaling up from one backyard to many. The Tick Project involves more than 900 families in neighborhoods that consist of about 30 to 50 participants. Yards are being treated in the spring and early summer with a fungal spray that kills ticks. Researchers also are deploying bait boxes to attract rodents. An insecticide in the box kills any ticks on mice and chipmunks, two animals largely responsible for infecting ticks with the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Researchers check in with families every two weeks in season to see whether anyone in the house, including cats and dogs, had ticks on them over the period. The Tick Project is funded mostly through a $5 million grant from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, created by the hedge fund manager and his wife. Ostfeld said 2021 is set aside for data analysis, thought they will have some sense of early results within a year. Ostfeld would not divulge which neighborhoods are involved or who is participating, citing the need for privacy and of keeping good relations with participants. Edward Blundell, mayor of the village of Red Hook, mentioned during an interview that he had agreed to take part in the study. While he felt he could take personal steps to protect himself from Lyme disease, he would be satisfied if something comes out of the research. “Let’s let the scientists look at this and give them a mini-lab site here, so we felt our yard could be the mini-site,” Blundell said. Tick researchers say such area-wide studies are complex and difficult to do. They are costly. It can be hard to get all the needed permissions. And variabilities in tick densities over study areas can make the science challenging. Thomas Mather, director of the Tick Encounter Resource Center at the University of Rhode Island, said executing a well-designed study large enough to produce valid results is a “Holy Grail” of tick researchers. Phillip Baker, executive director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation, said the neighborhood approach sounded like a good one but noted that ticks are a resilient parasite. “Ticks have been around for a long, long time,” Baker said, “and there’s no real easy approach to get rid of them.”

Ex Output:
Tick towns: Researchers target neighborhoods in Lyme effort.


Ex Input:
In a study in the medical journal The Lancet, they said the patients, with strains of TB known as extensively-drug resistant (XDR) and totally drug resistant (TDR) TB, have exhausted all available treatment options and are sent home. “These patients can survive for months or even years and are contributing to the community-based spread of XDR-TB,” said Keertan Dheda, who led the study at the University of Cape Town’s department of medicine. Tuberculosis infects the lungs and can spread through coughing and sneezing. In recent years, drug-resistant strains have spread around the world, batting off standard antibiotics and posing an increasingly urgent public health threat. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in Eastern Europe, Asia and South Africa, 450,000 people have MDR-TB, and around half of these will fail to respond to existing treatments. Dheda’s team followed 107 patients with XDR-TB from three provinces in South Africa between March 2008 and August 2012 to establish their fate. They also took samples from 56 patients and tested them to find out which and how many of 10 first- and second-line anti-TB drugs they were susceptible to. Despite being treated intensively with an average of eight anti-tuberculosis drugs, many of the patients fared poorly, with high rates of treatment failure and death. Five years after treatment initiation, only 12 of the patients had favorable outcomes and 74 percent had died. The researchers found that almost two-thirds of the tested patients had resistance to at least eight drugs, and there was one case of totally drug-resistant TB that was not susceptible to any of the 10 drugs tested. More worrisome, Dheda said, was that of the XDR-TB patients discharged into the general community, some 42 percent had failed to get better on treatment and were testing positive for active TB, and of these almost a third were at high risk of transmitting the disease. The patients also survived in the community for an average of 20 months - plenty of time to infect others. When people with lung TB cough, sneeze or spit, they propel the TB germs into the air. Another person needs to inhale only a few of these germs to become infected. “Alarmingly, we have shown for the first time that... treatment failure and discharge of such patients into the wider community is occurring systematically on a country-wide level in South Africa,” Dheda said in a statement about the findings. In one case where the researchers followed a genetic trail of transmission, they found that a patient with XDR-TB who was discharged after failing treatment went on to infect his brother, who also eventually died. Dheda said the reason many TB patients are being sent away from hospitals appeared to be lack of bed space in designated tuberculosis hospitals. “And alternative long-term residential and palliative care facilities are scarce.”  Commenting on the findings in The Lancet, Max O’Donnell from New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the United States said they should serve as an “urgent alarm”. “MDR-TB (multi-drug-resistant TB) in all its forms is an out-of-control problem with potentially vast and devastating consequences for global public health,” he wrote. “The situation regarding MDR and XDR-TB is bleak.”

Ex Output:
South Africa risks spreading totally drug-resistant TB: study.


Ex Input:
We don’t think that cost is relevant here. Like the story in Newsweek, which we also reviewed, this story does not provide an adequate sense of the size of the potential benefits, stating: In the study, those who met the physical activity target by exercising through the week had a 35% lower risk of death than the inactive adults, with cardiovascular deaths down 41% and a 21% lower risk of cancer death. Using only relative risk rates such as these doesn’t tell the full story. Read more on why absolute risk rates should also be included in news stories. It also makes the study sound like it was experimental in fashion, conflating association with causation. “People who cram all their exercise into one or two sessions at the weekend benefit nearly as much as those who work out more frequently, researchers say. A study of more than 60,000 adults in England and Scotland found that “weekend warriors” lowered their risk of death by a similar margin to those who spread the same amount of exercise over the whole week.” See more on the importance of not overstating observational findings. Although not explicit the story does provide some information on the potential harms before embarking on a “weekend warrior” status. The lead author of the paper recommended, “… to start with moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, and then to set realistic, incremental goals to boost confidence without running the risk of setbacks due to injury. “A middle aged or older person should do as much as 12 weeks of moderate exercise before introducing vigorous exercise.” The story provides some information about the study design, but is silent on the limitations, and they are significant. For example, the inactive population studied was 7 years older, had more current smokers, and suffered more from unspecified “long standing illness” than the participants who were active. Physical activity was only recorded at baseline. Also, more than 90% of the participants were white. No evidence of disease mongering here. The sources don’t appear to have any conflicts of interest, and there was one additional source included beyond the lead researcher. The story discusses the impact of different activity levels on early death risk. The ability to exercise is generally available, so this is N/A. Unlike the Newsweek story, the Guardian does discuss what’s novel: “The novel finding is that it appears the duration, and possibly the intensity, of leisure time physical activity is more important than the frequency,” Ekelund said. The story does not appear to rely on a news release.

Ex Output:

Weekend workouts can benefit health as much as a week of exercise, say researchers