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]: 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.
[A]: "Karen Sage Says that under a new program jail ""time for non-violent, mentally ill offenders has been reduced by 50 percent."


[Q]: The release does not mention cost. The FDA evaluates drugs without consideration of cost, so it’s understandable that they wouldn’t comment on it — and that’s why we’re rating this Not Applicable. But let’s be real here: The value of a new drug is a function not just of how well it works, but its cost-effectiveness. So we look forward to the day when any news release about a new drug — even one from the FDA — will include some mention of cost in its message. This release gives the preliminary results from a single study of 310 patients. Because the drug is experimental, long-term results haven’t been studied. Of the 310 patients enrolled in the lone trial upon which the approval is based, 14.8 percent showed some shrinkage of tumors during the assessment period lasting from 2.1 to about 13.8 months. For a subset of patients who were classified as having a positive response to PD-L1 expression, the response was 26 percent. As noted above, tumor shrinkage doesn’t always lead to improvements in survival or quality of life. It is a surrogate endpoint — a substitute — for the main outcome which is survival. Although this drug looks promising, to be fully transparent about its benefits as currently known, the release should have explained this. As noted in the “Summary,” another larger study is underway to assess the drug’s impact on extending life and improving quality of life. The release includes a description of side effects of this treatment. The most common ones included fatigue, decreased appetite, nausea, urinary tract infection, fever (pyrexia) and constipation. The release also mentions that patients taking the drug have an increased risk of infection and serious side effects that are “immune-mediated.” We would have liked a bit more context on what this term means for patients. The release outlines that this is the very first clinical trial of this compound for safety and efficacy, and under which regulatory paths the drug was assessed, including “breakthrough therapy designation, priority review status and accelerated approval.” We’re giving this release the benefit of the doubt and rating it Satisfactory for its bare bones description of the trial (and since we already addressed the lack of long-term survival data in the “Benefits” section.) As it stands, the results from the small trial were preliminary and short-term and did not reflect long-term survival. We would have liked to see a reference or link to the completed trial where one could look at the results to assess independently or learn more about the outcomes. We think the release should have provided more data on the patient demographics, the treatment regimen (dosing amount and schedule) as well as the range in tumor reduction. There is no disease mongering. This release describes the approval of a new drug by a regulatory agency, but we’d still like to know who sponsored the study that’s the basis for the approval. It’s not enough to state who markets the drug. The release does not give us very much information about alternatives. These patients had already received other therapy and their cancer had recurred, so it is implied that they had no other alternatives. But this isn’t stated very clearly. We can assume (and it seems evident) that the platinum-based therapy that the patients didn’t respond to initially is the usual treatment. The FDA’s approval of a drug clears the way for the drug sponsor to scale up production and begin marketing and selling the product. (The FDA doesn’t state this explicitly but it can be inferred.) A NYT article said the drug would be available in about two months. The release clearly states this product is first of its kind for this type of cancer. We found no unjustifiable language.
[A]: FDA approves new, targeted treatment for bladder cancer


[Q]: 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.”
[A]:
Tick towns: Researchers target neighborhoods in Lyme effort.