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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The local money will be added to $56 million already appropriated for the new clinic, which will be part of the VA’s Nebraska/Western Iowa Health Care System. The $86 million facility will be built on the campus of the current VA hospital in Omaha. “This project will lay the groundwork for future public-private partnerships aimed at providing veterans access to state-of-the-art facilities and will significantly improve the quality of care we are able to provide to our nation’s veterans,” said Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin in a news release. President Barack Obama in December signed a measure, dubbed the Chip In for Vets Act, that allows the public-private partnership. It was sponsored by U.S. Rep Brad Ashford, who represented Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District until losing his bid for re-election in November. VA officials have said the clinic that will be called the Veterans Affairs Ambulatory Center will offer primary, specialty and ambulatory care and operate radiological and surgical facilities. The current hospital will remain standing, and once the ambulatory care center is built, the hospital will be used primarily for administrative operations with some medical services, said Nebraska/Western Iowa Health Care System spokesman William Ackerman. He couldn’t immediately say where the four other pilot projects will occur. VA officials in Washington didn’t immediately return messages. Design work on the Omaha project will continue through 2017, and officials anticipate site work and construction will begin in early 2018, said Sue Morris, president of Heritage Services, a nonprofit civic group involved in the project. A 2007 study found the current Omaha hospital was plagued by problems in its electrical, heating and cooling systems. In 2011, the VA unveiled plans for a $560 million replacement. Congress approved $56 million to start the project planning, and the new structure tentatively was scheduled to open in 2018. But the plans and work were delayed by funding shortages and changing VA priorities. The public-private project had been projected to cost $136 million — $56 million from federal sources, $80 million from local benefactors. But Ackerman said the figure was decreased after details were refined since the number was discussed after Obama signed the legislation. The local corporation, the Veterans Ambulatory Center Development Corp., which will oversee design, construction and fundraising, was created by Heritage Services. Heritage Services was instrumental in creating major Omaha projects such as the Holland Performing Arts Center and TD Ameritrade Park, where the College World Series is held. ___ Information from: Omaha World-Herald, http://www.omaha.com
answer:
Nonprofit group commits $30M for new Omaha VA facility.


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"Crediting conservation in Austin, the Save Our Springs Alliance said in an Aug. 16, 2011, entry in its online newsletter: ""Ten years ago the Austin Water Utility used a total of 240.3 million gallons. Every summer since then our peak day of water use has been lower."" After noting that this year’s peak water use in a day was 217 million gallons, the entry continues: ""So raise a tall glass of ice water in honor of our success: water conservation gains have outpaced population growth for a decade. Add a ‘Salud!’ to another 10 years of flat or declining water use — easily achieved with cost-effective conservation measures and an emerging ‘culture of conservation,’ one that recognizes that we can thrive and be happy without oversized, overwatered New England-style turf grass lawns."" We can’t check on the next decade, but we can check if peak water usage has been less every year than what it was in 2001. Indeed, the Austin Water Utility sent us figures indicating that on the peak days of water consumption from 2002 through August 2011, customers used less water than the 240.3 million gallons used on Aug. 13, 2001, though that was barely so in one year. The greatest peak use day since 2001 was Aug. 26, 2006, when usage was 240.17 million gallons — about 5/100ths of a percent shy of the amount gulped, flushed and otherwise used in 2001. The lowest peak-use amount in the 10 years after 2001 was 176.98 million gallons on Aug. 13, 2007. Put another way, the average peak water use in a day in the period was about 214 million gallons, 11 percent off the 2001 peak. The utility’s director, Greg Meszaros, told us in an interview that conservation helps explain the lower peak-use amounts, though he said consumption generally bounces around year to year partly due to variations in the weather — rainy summers reduce demand — and the economy. Per-capita water consumption has been relatively flat, Meszaros said, since the utility instituted a conservation program in 2007 that, among features, encourages customers to use low-water appliances and limit lawn watering. According to the utility, customers have used less water per person lately than individuals did in past years. Per-capita daily use has averaged 190 gallons or more four times since 1990, the last time being 2006. Average per-person consumption slid to 151 gallons in 2007, reached 170 gallons in 2008 and then dipped two straight years, reaching less than 140 gallons in 2010. Daryl Slusher, an assistant director for the utility, said the average will approach 160 gallons for the year that ends Sept. 30. Save Our Springs maintains the area’s conservation successes demonstrate that a water treatment plant slated for Northwest Austin won’t be needed for many years. Meszaros told us Austin needs the new plant because two current plants can’t be relied on indefinitely. Also, he said, the new project will include a vital water transmission main easing the delivery of water to the fast-growing northern third of the utility’s service area. ""We’re not doing (the new plant) just to meet a peak water demand,"" Meszaros said. In an interview, Bill Bunch, SOS’s executive director, expressed skepticism about strains in the existing water delivery system. He also said there’s not sufficient water demand to justify the new one and forwarded an April 2002 recommendation from city staff about preliminary engineering for the new plant. The document states the plant would be needed by 2009 to meet increasing water demands, predicting too that the utility’s peak one-day demand in summer 2009 would be 281 million gallons; the peak amount that year turned out to be 228 million gallons. Utility spokesman Kevin Buchman later told us by email that in 2002, the ""main reason for moving forward with the construction of a new plant was to meet the projected demands."" He said, though, the utility’s mid-decade focus on conservation allowed the city to postpone the plant’s completion by more than five years. ""Also,"" Buchman said, ""since 2002 we have had one of our (originally three) plants decommissioned and our other two water plants have been expanded as much as possible."" We won’t try to settle the water plant debate here. But the alliance’s statement about peak water use rates ."
answer:
Ten years ago the Austin Water Utility used a total of 240.3 million gallons. Every summer since then our peak day of water use has been lower.


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Outbreak response experts at the World Health Organization (WHO) and at the vaccines alliance GAVI are already talking to the leading Ebola vaccine manufacturer, Merck, to reassess just how much larger global stocks need to be. “We’re actively engaged with the World Health Organization and with groups like GAVI, the U.S. government and others to try to understand what will be an appropriate sized stockpile in the future,” Merck’s head of vaccines clinical research, Beth-Ann Coller, said in a telephone interview. Supply of the Merck shot, which is currently being used to fight a large and spreading outbreak of Ebola in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, is not a problem right now, according to the WHO’s deputy director-general of emergency preparedness and response, Peter Salama. But the nature of Ebola outbreaks is changing, he told Reuters. As the virus finds its way out of rural villages into populous urban settings, plans for how to contain it in future must change too. “What I’m concerned about is the medium- to long-term stockpile. The figure of 300,000 was very much based on previous Ebola outbreaks where you never really had huge numbers of cases because they were in isolated, rural, populations. But now, we increasingly see Ebola in mega-cities and towns.”   “We need to view it now as an urban disease as well as a rural one - and therefore one requiring a different order of magnitude of preparations, including vaccines,” he said. Merck’s experimental Ebola vaccine, known as rVSV-ZEBOV, is the furthest ahead in development. Another potential vaccine being developed by Johnson & Johnson could also eventually become part of the stockpile, global health officials say. Congo’s two Ebola outbreaks this year illustrate the shifting nature of the threat. The first was relatively contained, infecting up to 54 people and killing 33 of them in an area of DRC’s Equateur Province that is remote and sparsely populated. Several of the eight outbreaks before this one in Congo - including one in 2014 and another in 2017 both also in Equateur - were also quickly contained and limited in size. But this year’s second outbreak in Congo - and the country’s tenth since the virus was first identified there in 1976 - is concentrated not in rural villages but in urban areas of the North Kivu and Ituri provinces. It has already infected more than 450 people, killed more than 270, and last month spread to Butembo, a densely populated city of about one million. This kind of prospect means global health emergency responders must “review our assumptions around Ebola”, Salama said. “If it were to take off in Butembo, or Goma, or, even worse, Kinshasa, we’d be talking about a totally different issue in terms of ... vaccine supplies required.”  Seth Berkley, chief executive of the GAVI vaccines alliance which has an agreement with Merck to ensure a current stockpile of 300,000 rVSV-ZEBOV doses, told Reuters that around 40,000 doses had been used so far in the Congo outbreak. The emergency response is based on “ring vaccination” which aims to control an outbreak by identifying and offering the vaccine to contacts of anyone likely to be infected. This method uses relatively small numbers of vaccine doses and forms a human buffer of immunity to try to prevent spread of the disease. For now in Congo, Berkley said, there is no immediate need to boost the stockpile. But looking towards future inevitable outbreaks, the numbers would likely need to change. “The challenge we would have - and this has been under discussion - is if we started to do community-based vaccination in urban and semi-urban areas. That’s when the numbers would start to get quite big quite quickly,” he told Reuters. Merck’s shot has proven safe and effective in trials in West Africa but has yet to be approved for a license by U.S. and European regulators, so is being used in the Congo outbreak under special emergency rules for experimental products. When it gets approval, which Coller hopes would be in 2019, it will be made at a newly built manufacturing plant in Germany. Coller said Merck is not yet clear how many doses a year, or a month, the German facility could churn out once it is in production, but she stressed the company would “work collaboratively with the public health agencies to do our best to support their needs”.
answer:

As Ebola threatens mega-cities, vaccine stockpile needs grow.