instruction:
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.
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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.”
answer:
South Africa risks spreading totally drug-resistant TB: study.


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Karen Sage of Austin, facing a Tuesday runoff with Mindy Montford of Austin for the Democratic nod for a judgeship, touts her experience as a prosecutor overseeing a new unit focused on defendants with mental illness. With no Republican opponent in November, the winner of the runoff will likely be a shoo-in for Travis County’s 299th state District Court judgeship. In a mailer sent to voters April 3, Sage celebrates the new program, saying that jail “time for non-violent, mentally ill offenders has been reduced by 50 percent.”We wondered if Sage’s statement—echoed in a TV ad she debuted Wednesday—reflects reality. Sage’s campaign initially referred us to Rosemary Lehmberg, the Travis County district attorney. Lehmberg confirmed that she asked Sage, an assistant district attorney, to helm the felony mental health unit, which was started in January 2009. Claire Dawson-Brown, the DA’s director of strategic prosecutions, said a magistrate started handling a special docket comprised of “mental health” defendants in late April 2009. To be in the program, Dawson-Brown said, defendants must usually be charged with a non-violent crime. They also must be diagnosed with major depression or considered bipolar, schizo-affective or schizophrenic, and seen as unstable in the jail. “It would be someone in a crisis situation,” she said, “or their mental illness is impairing their behavior.” Experts team to address the needs of the mental health inmates, Dawson-Brown said. She said participants get services they need in custody and when they return to the community. Besides Sage, who has a paralegal and a secretary, each defendant has an attorney familiar with mental health issues; she said the magistrate, a jail counselor and officials serving the local mental health and adult probation systems also play roles, with social workers sometimes getting involved. And how has the program affected jail stays? Sage said she reached her 50-percent reduction statement by comparing a baseline estimate that “mental health” inmates facing felony charges were averaging 106 days in jail before the program began to the 42-day average for participants in the program at the time she left the office in mid-December to run for judge. The decrease amounts to 60 percent. Dawson-Brown agreed that as of late 2008 and early 2009, the average Travis County jail stay for all its “mental health” defendants, including violent offenders, was 106 days. We pointed out that the baseline figure sweeps in the longer jail stays of individuals charged with violent crimes who aren’t automatically put in the new program, driving up the pre-program average and potentially skewing before and after comparisons. Dawson-Brown then gave us more detailed jail-stay information enabling an improved review of the change in average jail stays. Based on the new figures, we estimate that defendants who have been through the new program would have averaged 77 days in jail before the program began. The nitty gritty: We multiplied the number of affected defendants categorized by the level of felony they faced--ranging from first-degree felony charges to second- and third-degree felonies to state-jail felony charges--by the days that similarly charged defendants averaged in jail before the program began. Next, we totaled those defendant-days-in-jail and divided the total (19,432) by the number of defendants (253) to reach the pre-program estimate of an average of 77 days in jail. Through February, the magistrate had processed 253 defendants since the program’s start, according to Dawson-Brown, and they averaged 36 days in jail. Best we can tell, the average jail stay for defendants dropped by 41 days, or 53 percent.
answer:
"Karen Sage Says that under a new program jail ""time for non-violent, mentally ill offenders has been reduced by 50 percent."


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McDonald’s has implemented contactless pickup and delivery of Big Macs, fries and other menu items across the China as the outbreak has unfolded. Customers order remotely – on mobile phones or by computers in store – and employees seal the meals in bags and put them in a special spot for pickup without human contact, McDonald’s says on its website. For delivery orders, drivers drop McDonald’s packages at building entrances, disinfect their delivery bags and wash their hands more frequently. Drivers carry ID cards showing that they - and the people who made and packaged their food - had their body temperature scanned to prove they do not have a fever. “While we look at how to further improve the process, the stepped-up preventive measures apply to all of our servicing channels,” McDonald’s said in a statement to Reuters. The flu-like virus has infected more than 68,500 people globally and killed 1,665 as of Sunday, mostly in the central Chinese province of Hubei. Some major Chinese cities still resemble ghost towns as China struggles to get its economy back on track after a prolonged Lunar New Year holiday. In early February, 83% of all stores on the Meituan-Dianping delivery platform - one of the largest in the country - were closed, according to Beijing-based data firm BigOne Lab. Earlier this month, China’s National Health Commission recommended that deliveries limit contact. Starbucks suggests customers order coffee via its app and then wait outside its cafés until they get a pick-up notice. Orders are placed on tables just inside café entrances. If they do enter Starbucks locations, customers have their temperature taken at the door, as fever is one of the main symptoms of infection, and baristas wear masks. For delivery, Starbucks said it regularly sterilizes containers and that its delivery people have their temperature taken daily. Indoors staff must wash hands every 30 minutes, and public areas are sterilized every 2 hours. Starbucks delivery is provided by ele.me, owned by ecommerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The measures illustrate how companies are quickly adapting in order to sell prepared food while keeping people safe. Yum China Holdings Inc rolled out contactless delivery on Jan. 30, with contactless pickup coming two days later at its KFC and Pizza Hut locations, the company said. There had been contactless delivery in China prior to the crisis, when couriers would drop packages at a consumer’s door or lobby or place parcels in lockers for later pickup. But since the outbreak, many residential compounds are limiting access for drivers and asking customers to pick up their own packages. In transactions that previously would have involved one person handing a package to the other, the driver now puts the food down – on the back of a moped, for instance – and then steps back and waits for the customer to take it and leave. One customer, for example, asked a delivery person to put a parcel in the elevator and press the button for the designated floor. The customer grabbed the package when the doors opened - unaccompanied by the courier, according to a post on CCTV News’ social media account on Weibo, said Allison Malmsten, a marketing strategy analyst at Daxue Consulting in Shanghai. The outbreak “redefines contactless food delivery,” Malmsten said via email. Since the start of the outbreak, Yum China has closed more than 30% of its locations. There have been “significant interruptions,” with sales off as much as 50% in those that remained open since the Lunar New Year holiday, versus the same time last year, Chief Financial Officer Ka Wai Yeung said in a Feb. 5 earnings call. The crisis has accelerated the rollout of Yum China’s  contactless services in China, it said in a statement. “These services have been well-received by customers and are playing an important role in ensuring that our delivery business continues to hold up during this period of significantly reduced dine-in traffic,” it said. Early during the epidemic, meal delivery took a hit because customers feared contact with drivers would put them at risk of infection, according to news reports. Cases of couriers being diagnosed with the virus after working for days arose in Shenzhen and Qingdao cities. The companies’ reliance on pickup and delivery to offset some losses does, however, have limitations. Malmsten said many drivers cannot return to work due to travel restrictions, and those who can return face long hours and physical and mental fatigue. As a result, SF Express, the second-largest courier in China, has ramped up hiring, she said.
answer:

Fast-food companies in China step up ‘contactless’ pickup, delivery as coronavirus rages.