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.

Q: Chances are low the situation will imperil other cattle herds or people, particularly since the herd in southeastern North Dakota’s Sargent County has been quarantined. But it could delay solving the mystery of how a strain of bovine TB similar to cases associated with cattle south of the U.S. border surfaced in cows near the northern border. “We are the workforce right now in the field, and we have limited staff,” State Veterinarian Susan Keller said Wednesday of the North Dakota Agriculture Department’s Animal Health Division, which has only a handful of workers. She said federal officials wanted to help but couldn’t because of the shutdown tied to a dispute over funding a southern border wall. President Donald Trump and congressional leaders on Friday struck a short-term deal to reopen the government for three weeks, ending a record, 35-day partial shutdown. Two cows from the Sargent County herd tested positive for bovine TB at slaughter plants in South Dakota and Minnesota, and the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Iowa confirmed the diagnosis late last year. The herd was then tested, and five more cows were confirmed to have the infectious disease that can be passed between cattle and people. The source is still unknown. The ranchers have not bought any cattle from Mexico, have no ties to the country and have no workers from south of the border, according to Keller. “It’s a very slow-growing organism. It could have been there (in the herd) for quite a while. We don’t know when it was introduced or where it came from,” she said. “Maybe it’s a strain that has been here (U.S.) for a while but it’s mutated.” Bovine TB is a public health concern worldwide, though the risk to people in developed countries is low given advances in prevention and control measures such as testing, culling of diseased animals and pasteurizing of milk, according to the National Institutes of Health. North Dakota is not alone in recently identifying a new strain of bovine TB — officials in Canada are investigating cattle infections in the province of British Columbia that involve a strain not previously documented in that country, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. “You can have mutations of TB, similar to influenza,” Keller said, stressing that a new strain is not comparable to a new disease — it doesn’t change measures in place to guard against bovine TB. The new case is still a concern to ranchers, according to Julie Ellingson, executive vice president of the North Dakota Stockmen’s Association. “The livestock industry is concerned about any and all cases of TB, no matter what the strain,” she said. “We have worked hard to maintain a healthy herd in our state, and identifying and addressing the situation as quickly as possible is our highest priority.” Responses to such animal disease cases are a cooperative effort of state and federal agencies, particularly the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and its Veterinary Services and Wildlife Services components. North Dakota’s Animal Health Division has received only limited help so far from those agencies and in particular is waiting on information that will help determine whether the entire herd of about 100 animals is slaughtered or whether the owners can continue managing the rest of the herd with ongoing testing. Officials also are working to determine where all of the animals in the herd originated, and to ensure that none ended up in other herds over the past five years. Keller said the likelihood of that is remote given that the ranchers raise cattle for beef, not to provide seed stock to other ranchers. It wasn’t clear how many APHIS officials have been available to work on the case. Agency spokeswoman Lyndsay Cole, who was herself furloughed but on call, said only that the agency “is assisting with diagnostic testing” and would provide further help “once the lapse in appropriations is over.” The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which represents more than 175,000 cattle ranchers and feeders around the country, did not directly comment on the federal shutdown’s impact on the North Dakota investigation. Chief Veterinarian Kathy Simmons in a statement to The Associated Press expressed confidence that Keller and other North Dakota officials working in conjunction with federal officials “can manage a successful disease response.” Keller said the investigation could stretch out for several months, but she hopes to be able to say definitively by early summer that officials have taken all necessary actions to ensure no spread of the disease. “Neighbors, people in the community, neighboring states, they want to know — do you have things tied up?” she said. ___ Follow Blake Nicholson on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/NicholsonBlake

A: Federal shutdown affected probe into unique bovine TB case.
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Q: The new rules, which have been opened to the public for consultation, will involve the establishment of a comprehensive “management system” covering the production, sale, utilization and recycling of thin plastic film in the countryside. Chinese farmers, mostly in the arid north and west, cover fields with vast amounts of “plastic mulch” to help maintain soil moisture and protect against pests. The technique has played an important role in boosting yields and raising the quality of crops, the agriculture ministry said in a notice. “But because of excessive use and inadequate recycling, agricultural-use plastic film pollution in some regions has been getting worse and worse, and it has already become a major environmental problem holding back the green development of agriculture,” the ministry said. In areas of northwest China that made use of plastic mulch, contamination rates stood at an average of 36 kilograms per hectare, with the figure as high as 138 kilograms in some regions, it said. The new rules would force farmers to use only film that meets quality standards, and they must also collect plastic waste from fields before its expiry date and deliver to approved recycling outlets. They will also be encouraged to reuse old film. China is said to use about 2 million tonnes of plastic film every year to cover around 200,000 square kilometers of farmland, an area the size of Belarus. But government researchers say the recycling rate stands at just 180,000 tonnes. If uncollected, the plastic waste eventually degrades the soil and could also infiltrate crops, with one parliamentary delegate from Shandong warning in March that some of the province’s exports of ginger and spinach had been contaminated. Beijing is aiming to make around 90% of its total farmland safe for agriculture by the end of next year, part of its efforts to guarantee food security.

A: China drafts new rules to control rural plastic pollution.
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Q: Experts have long sought to understand the link between mental illness and violence and these findings suggest that the widespread public perception that psychiatric disorders alone make people more prone to violent crime is flawed. Researchers from Britain and Sweden who studied rates of violent crime among people with severe mental disorders said it appeared that the higher risk of substance abuse is the key. They found that while rates of violent crime are higher among people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia than in the general population, they are similar in people with mental illness and those who abuse substances but are not mentally ill. When the results were adjusted to removed the influence of alcohol or illegal drug abuse, rates of violence among psychiatric patients were barely changed from levels in the general population, they said. “Substance abuse is really the key mediator of violent crime. If you take away the substance abuse, the contribution of the illness...is very minimal,” said Seena Fazel of Oxford University’s department of psychiatry, who led a study. “It is probably more dangerous to be walking outside a pub on a late night that it is to be walking outside a hospital where mental health patients are being released.”   Previous studies have shown that around 20 percent of people with bipolar disorder abuse alcohol and drugs, and this compares with around 2 percent of the general population. Around a quarter of people with schizophrenia abuse drugs and alcohol. Fazel said psychiatric patients often use illegal drugs and alcohol to try to counteract their symptoms or the effects of their medicines, which can act as sedatives. In Britain, several high-profile criminal cases have led to the idea that the mentally ill pose a threat to society. Reports earlier this year that the “Yorkshire Ripper” serial killer Peter Sutcliffe was appealing against his sentence because he said he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia when he murdered 13 women reinforced that perception. Fazel, whose work was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal, said public perception that the mentally ill are a threat had led to large numbers of psychiatric patients being put into secure hospitals in recent years. “There has been a sort of re-institutionalization of patients with mental illness... under the guise that they are dangerous,” he told reporters at a briefing. Fazel and colleagues used hospital registers in Sweden to track everyone diagnosed with bipolar disorder and then look for links with violent crime convictions. Since rates of mental illness, as well as rates of violence and of alcohol and drug abuse are similar in Sweden to the rest of Europe and the United States, the findings were likely to be applicable to other countries, the scientists said.

A:
Mental illness alone not linked to violence.
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