Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.

Q: Paragraph: Older adults who underwent a brief course of brain exercises saw improvements in reasoning skills and processing speed that could be detected as long as 10 years after the course ended, according to results from the largest study ever on cognitive training. The findings, published on Monday in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, offer welcome news in the search for ways to keep the mind sharp as 76 million baby boomers in the United States advance into old age. The federally sponsored trial of almost 3,000 older adults, called the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly study, or ACTIVE, looked at how three brain training programs - focusing on processing speed, memory and reasoning ability - affected cognitively normal adults as they aged. People in the study had an average age of 74 when they started the training, which involved 10 to 12 sessions lasting 60 to 75 minutes each. After five years, researchers found, those with the training performed better than their untrained counterparts in all three measures. Although gains in memory seen at the study’s five-year mark appeared to drop off over the next five years, gains in reasoning ability and processing speed persisted 10 years after the training. “What we found was pretty astounding. Ten years after the training, there was evidence the effects were durable for the reasoning and the speed training,” said George Rebok, an expert on aging and a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the study. Participants in all three training groups also reported that they had an easier time with daily activities such as managing their medications, cooking meals or handling their finances than did participants who did not get the training. But standard tests of these activities showed no differences between the groups. “The speed-of-processing results are very encouraging,” said study co-author Jonathan King, program director for cognitive aging in the Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, which helped fund the research. King said the self-reported improvements in daily function were interesting, but added, “We do not yet know whether they would truly allow older people to live independently longer.”  However, researchers said even a small gain would be likely to ease the burden on caregivers and healthcare providers. “If we delay the onset of difficulties in daily activities even by a small amount, that can have major public health implications in terms of helping to curb healthcare costs, delaying entry into institutions and hospitals,” Rebok said. The training course was designed to bolster specific cognitive abilities that begin to slip as people age. It does not aim to prevent dementia caused by underlying disease such as Alzheimer’s. At the start of the study, all 2,832 participants were cognitively normal. The study included four groups: three training groups plus a control group of volunteers who came in for regular testing to see how they were faring with age. People were trained in small groups over a period of several weeks and then were tested immediately after the training and again one, two, three, five and 10 years later. About 60 percent of the volunteers who underwent training also got booster training sessions, which enhanced the initial benefits. At the end of the trial, all groups showed declines compared with their initial baseline tests in memory, reasoning and processing speed, but those who got training in reasoning and processing speed experienced less decline. Among those given training in reasoning strategies, 73.6 percent were still performing above their pre-trial baseline level, compared with 61.7 percent of those who received no training and were only benefiting from practice on the test. The effect was even greater in processing speed. Among the training group, 70.7 percent of participants were performing at or above their baseline level, compared with 48.8 percent of those in the control group. There was no difference in memory performance between the memory group and the control group after 10 years. Two of the three training programs - the memory and the reasoning strategies - were done with paper and pencil, while the processing speed training was done on a computer. The programs, developed by the researchers, were focused largely on teaching strategies to improve cognitive performance. For example, the memory training taught people how to remember word lists, sequences and main ideas, while the reasoning training focused on things like recognizing number patterns. In the processing speed training, people were asked to focus on the main object in a computer screen while also trying to quickly recognize and identify objects on the periphery of the screen. Such training can help older drivers with things like recognizing road signs while driving. A version of the speed training program developed for this trial is now commercially available through the brain fitness company Posit Science, but the researchers are working on making other types of training available as well. Rebok’s team just got a grant from the National Institute on Aging to make a computerized version of the memory test, with the hope that repeated training can improve the results. The study was not designed to explain why cognitive training can have such a lasting effect. Rebok said it may be that people take the strategies they learn and practice them over time. As they age, trained individuals can rely on these strategies to compensate for their declines. Whether this training actually strengthened the brain in the way that exercising builds muscle is not clear, but the government intends to study this, too. Last week, NIA put out a request for proposals that would study whether cognitive training causes physical changes in the brain. Claim: Brain training helped older adults stay sharp for years: study.

A: A brief course of brain exercises helped older adults hold on to improvements in reasoning skills and processing speed for 10 years after the course ended, according to results from the largest study ever done on cognitive training.
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Q: Paragraph: Three of the other five patients are in either a serious or a critical condition in hospital, while the remaining two have mild symptoms, the United Nations health agency said in a disease outbreak update. H7N9 bird flu emerged last year in China and has infected around 150 people so far there and in Taiwan and Hong Kong, killing at least 46 of them. The latest death was a 38-year-old man from China’s Fujian Province who became ill with H7N9 on January 3, was admitted to hospital on January 8 but died 2 days later. He had underlying illnesses, including tuberculosis and pneumoconiosis. China’s state news agency Xinhua reported another death from H7N9 in the southwestern Guizhou province on Monday, but this has yet to be confirmed by the WHO. A 65-year-old man infected with H7N9 also died in Hong Kong, the government said on Monday. The WHO reiterated there is no evidence as yet of any easy or sustained person-to-person transmission of the strain, and that the source of the human infections is still under investigation. Researchers in the United States said last month that while it is not impossible that H7N9 could become easily transmissible between people, it would need to undergo multiple mutations to do that. Scientists around the world are keeping a watchful eye, on alert for any sign the virus might develop that potential and start to spread rapidly. Claim: Death toll from new China bird flu rises: WHO.

A: Six more people in China have been confirmed as infected with the new H7N9 strain of bird flu and one of them has died, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday.
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Q: Paragraph: The reported spills, which have not been publicly detailed, occurred at U.S. Oil Recovery, a former petroleum industry waste processing plant contaminated with a dangerous brew of cancer-causing chemicals. On Aug. 29, the day Harvey’s remnants cleared out, a county pollution control team sent photos to the Environmental Protection Agency of three large concrete tanks flooded with water. That led PRP Group, the company overseeing the ongoing cleanup, to call a federal emergency hotline to report a spill affecting nearby Vince Bayou. Over the next several days, the company reported two more spills of potentially contaminated storm water from U.S. Oil Recovery, according to reports and call logs obtained by the AP from the U.S. Coast Guard, which operates the National Response Center hotline. The EPA requires that spills of oil or hazardous substances in quantities that may be harmful to public health or the environment be immediately reported to the 24-hour hotline when public waterways are threatened. The EPA has not publicly acknowledged the three spills that PRP Group reported to the Coast Guard. The agency said an on-scene coordinator was at the site last Wednesday and found no evidence that material had washed off the site. The EPA says it is still assessing the scene. The AP reported in the days after Harvey that at least seven Superfund sites in and around Houston were underwater during the record-shattering storm. Journalists surveyed the sites by boat, vehicle and on foot. U.S. Oil Recovery was not one of the sites visited by AP. EPA said at the time that its personnel had been unable to reach the sites, though they surveyed the locations using aerial photos. Following AP’s report, EPA has been highlighting the federal agency’s response to the flooding at Superfund sites. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt reiterated that safeguarding the intensely polluted sites is among his top priorities, during a visit Friday to the San Jacinto River Waste Pits, one of the sites AP reported about two weeks ago. Pruitt then boarded a Coast Guard aircraft for an aerial tour of other nearby Superfund sites flooded by Harvey, including U.S. Oil Recovery. Photos taken Aug. 31 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show dark-colored water surrounding the site two days after the first spill was reported to the government hotline. While the photos do not prove contaminated materials leaked from U.S. Oil Recovery, they do show that as the murky floodwaters receded, they flowed through Vince Bayou and emptied into the ship channel leading to the San Jacinto River. The hotline caller identified Vince Bayou as the waterway affected by a spill of unknown material in unknown amounts. Thomas Voltaggio, a retired EPA official who oversaw Superfund cleanups and emergency responses for more than two decades, reviewed the aerial photos, hotline reports and other documents obtained by AP. “It is intuitively obvious that the rains and floods of the magnitude that occurred during Hurricane Harvey would have resulted in some level of contamination having been released to the environment,” said Voltaggio, who is now a private consultant. “Any contamination in those tanks would likely have entered Vince Bayou and potentially the Houston Ship Channel.” He said the amount of contaminants spread from the site during the storm will likely never be known, making the environmental impact difficult to measure. The Houston Ship Channel was already a polluted waterway, with Texas state health officials warning that women of childbearing age and children should not eat fish or crabs caught there because of contamination from dioxins and PCBs. PRP Group, the corporation formed to oversee the cleanup at U.S. Oil Recovery, said it reported the spills as legally required but said subsequent testing of storm water remaining in the affected tanks showed it met federal drinking water standards. The company declined to provide AP copies of those lab reports or a list of specific chemicals for which it tested, saying the EPA was expected to release that information soon. U.S. Oil Recovery was shut down in 2010 after regulators determined operations there posed an environmental threat to Vince Bayou, which flows through the property in Pasadena. Pollution at the former hazardous waste treatment plant is so bad that Texas prosecutors charged the company’s owner, Klaus Genssler, with five criminal felonies. The German native fled the United States and is considered a fugitive. Genssler did not respond to efforts to contact him last week through his social media accounts or an email account linked to his website address. More than 100 companies that sent hazardous materials and oily waste to U.S. Oil Recovery for processing are now paying for the multimillion-dollar cleanup there through a court-monitored settlement, including Baker Hughes Oilfield Operations Inc., U.S. Steel Corp. and Dow Chemical Co. Past sampling of materials at the site revealed high concentrations of hazardous chemicals linked to cancer, such as benzene, ethylbenzene and trichloroethylene. The site also potentially contains toxic heavy metals, including mercury and arsenic. A 2012 EPA study of the more than 500 Superfund sites across the United States located in flood zones specifically noted the risk that floodwaters might carry away and spread toxic materials over a wider area. Over the past six years, remediation efforts at U.S. Oil Recovery have focused on the northern half of the site, including demolishing contaminated structures, removing an estimated 500 tons of sludge and hauling away more than 1,000 abandoned containers of waste. PRP Group said the southern portion of the site, including the three waste tanks that flooded during Harvey, has not yet been fully cleaned. Over the years workers have removed more than 1.5 million gallons of liquid waste — enough to fill nearly three Olympic-sized swimming pools. AP began asking the EPA whether contaminated material might have again leaked from U.S. Oil Recovery last week, after reviewing the aerial photos taken Aug. 31. The EPA said it visited the site on Sept. 4, nearly a week after site operators reported an initial spill, and again the following week. The EPA said that its staff saw no evidence that toxins had washed away from the scene during either visit. “Yesterday, an EPA On-scene coordinator conducted an inspection of Vince Bayou to follow up on a rumor that material was offsite and did not find any evidence of a black oily discharge or material from the U.S. Oil Recovery site,” an EPA media release said on Thursday. PRP Group said the spills occurred at the toxic waste site on Aug. 29, Sept. 6 and Sept. 7. One of the EPA’s media releases on Sept. 9, more than 11 days after the first call was made to the hotline, made reference to overflowing water at the scene, but did not describe it as a spill. The company said it reported the first spill after Harvey’s floodwaters swamped the three tanks, filling them. The resulting pressure that built up in the tanks dislodged plugs blocking a series of interconnecting pipes, causing the second and third spills reported to the hotline the following week. The company does not know how much material leaked from the tanks, soaking into the soil or flowing into nearby Vince Bayou. As part of its post-storm cleanup workers have vacuumed 63 truckloads holding about 315,000 gallons from the tanks. The Superfund site is located just a few hundred yards from the Pollution Control Services offices for Harris County, which includes Houston. Its director, Bob Allen, says his team took pictures of the flooding on Aug. 29, when the area that includes the three big tanks was still underwater. The AP requested those photos as public records, but they have not yet been released. Allen said his staff did not note any black water or oily sheen on the surface at the time, and did not collect water samples for testing. He said the EPA later sampled the area to determine whether there was contamination. “We knew that the water probably got into the plant, probably washed out some of the stuff that was in the clarifier,” Allen said, referring to one of the old concrete tanks once used to store toxic waste. “Once they get done with the assessment of that site and the other Superfund Harris County sites, then they’ll probably let us know, let the public know, what’s been going on.” ___ Biesecker reported from Washington. Associated Press reporters Reese Dunklin in Dallas and Jeff Horwitz in Washington contributed to this reporting. ___ Follow Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck and Bajak at https://twitter.com/fbajak ___ Submit a confidential tip to The Associated Press at https://www.ap.org.tips Claim: AP Exclusive: Evidence of spills at toxic site during floods.

A:
The U.S. government received reports of three spills at one of Houston’s dirtiest Superfund toxic waste sites in the days after the drenching rains from Hurricane Harvey finally stopped. Aerial photos reviewed by The Associated Press show dark-colored water surrounding the site as the floods receded, flowing through Vince Bayou and into the city’s ship channel.
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