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: The two on Thursday toured a Lowndes County neighborhood where residents say the sewage system regularly overflows into their yards and homes. They then held a town hall in Hayneville. Charlie Mae Holcombe, 70, of Hayneville, said heavy rains are always a sign of trouble. Holcombe described the problems she faced as Gore and Barber spoke with her in her driveway. She said the toilets in her house will begin to bubble as a sign the sewage system is about to backup, sometimes filling her yard — including the area around a child’s swing set — and her house with raw sewage. “They have had to come and pump it out of my yard with the pump truck,” Holcombe said. “It’s backing up, even in my bathtub. The sewage has run over all in the house.” Her home in Lowndes County is in an area that has been plagued by sewage problems and concerns about potential illness. “I have heard about it and seen pictures of it for a long time, but it was shocking to see it in person,” Gore said of the conditions he saw. Alabama’s Black Belt region gets its name for the dark rich soil that once gave rise to cotton plantations. But the type of soil makes it difficult for traditional septic tanks, in which wastewater filters through the ground, to function properly, said Alabama State Health Officer Scott Harris in an interview with The Associated Press. The region’s intense poverty and inadequate municipal infrastructure contribute to the problem. “Sewage is typically handled at a local level... These counties haven’t always been able to do that,” Harris said. Catherine Coleman Flowers, an activist who has worked on rural environmental issues in the county for years, said wastewater sanitation problems are not limited to Alabama’s Black Belt. “It’s all over the country,” Flowers said, adding that climate change, with heavy rains and rising water tables, will make it worse. Holcombe said she’s not sure what it means, but when a red light flashes at a sewage treatment lagoon across the street, it is a reliable sign that her yard will flood. In addition to overwhelmed septic and sewage systems, some homes in the rural county are on “straight pipe” systems where sewage runs untreated from home to yard. Harris said a May survey of almost 200 Lowndes County households found that two to three percent of the households were on straight pipe systems. Holcombe’s home sits not far from the state highway where voting rights marchers walked from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Barber noted the proximity to the key sites of the civil rights movement and said the environmental issues are about the continued fight for justice. The town hall, held at a community center in Hayneville, focused on a number of environmental issues. Birmingham resident Jimmy Smith described living near a Superfund site in Birmingham. Others described concerns about landfills, straight pipe sewage systems and coal ash disposal in the Black Belt. At the town hall, Gore criticized what he described as the continued resistance from power companies and politicians to switching to renewable forms of energy such as solar energy. “It’s really a disgrace that this far Southern state with abundant sunshine is deprived of the advantages of the solar revolution being enjoyed all over the world,” Gore said.

A: Environmental justice issues focus of town hall.
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Q: The Kansas Department of Health and Environment announced Thursday that students entering kindergarten and first grade will need two doses of a hepatitis A vaccine. Students entering seventh grade will need one dose of the meningococcal ACWY vaccine. And students starting their junior year will need the meningococcal ACWY vaccine if they have not been vaccinated before their 16th birthday. The new requirements take effect Aug. 2. Kansas allows exemptions from vaccines only for medical and religious reasons. Health department Secretary Lee Norman said the agency collected public input before proposing the new requirements. He said meningitis and hepatitis A are both severe diseases that are preventable with vaccines.

A: 2 new vaccines required for some Kansas school students.
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Q: The story tackles this issue head on, as here: “Novartis has not disclosed the price for its therapy, but analysts are predicting $300,000 to $600,000 for a one-time infusion.” This is satisfactory, but barely. Here’s how the story addresses benefits for the CAR T-cell treatment: “In the pivotal trial testing the therapy in almost a dozen countries, 83 percent of patients went into remission. A year later, two-thirds remained so.” That information would be much more useful if it placed those numbers in context. For example, how many patients were enrolled in the study? 83 percent could be 13 out of 16 patients, or it could be 1,328 patients out of 1,600. And how does 83 percent compare to standard treatment? Similarly, is the story telling us that two-thirds of all patients were still in remission a year later? Or did it mean that two-thirds of the 83 percent were still in remission a year later? Contextual information would have provided some much-needed clarity here. The story notes: “The revved-up immune system [that results from the CAR T-cell treatment] becomes a potent cancer-fighting agent but also a dangerous threat to the patient. Serious side effects abound, raising concerns about broad use.” The story then goes on to discuss those potential harms more thoroughly. Ordinarily, this would be sufficient for a Satisfactory rating. But given the severity and frequency of serious, life-threatening events, the story needed numbers: What percentage of patients in the trial experienced a serious immune reaction? How many died? There are also plenty of unknowns with a new cancer treatment, such as lack of data on long-term prognosis. The story refers to a “pivotal trial testing the therapy in almost a dozen countries,” but offers little additional information. While the story offers an in-depth history of the research that led up to this treatment, readers are given very little information about the trials that provide insight into how well the treatment works and its associated risks. There’s really no disease mongering here, though there is one point that we’d like to single out. The story states that the CAR T-cell treatment “initially would be available only for the small number of children and young adults whose leukemia does not respond to standard care. Those patients typically have a grim prognosis” [emphasis added]. What does it mean to “typically have a grim prognosis”? It’s a fine turn of phrase, but it doesn’t actually convey much information — and it’s scary. In a case like this, it would likely be better to let the numbers speak for themselves. Or, if a story does include this sort of language, to back it up with some numbers. All of the sources in the story are patients, parents of patients, are associated with the pharmaceutical industry, or were involved with the relevant research being discussed. That said, the sources — and their conflicts of interest — were all clearly identified. Still, the story would have benefited from some independent, expert input. First of all, the story makes clear that CAR T-cell treatment — if approved — would be available only to those for whom conventional treatments have not worked. That’s a key point. Second, the story does articulate the difference between this form of immunotherapy (which is customized to the patient) and other immunotherapy techniques, which are so-called “checkpoint inhibitors” and are not individualized. As mentioned earlier, we would have liked to have seen more data on the success rates of standard treatment vs these treatments. The story clearly lays out where this treatment is in the FDA review process, how that process may unfold, and what this may mean for future availability. In addition, the story explains that CAR T-cell treatment would not be rolled out universally, but — if approved — would be available only through designated treatment facilities that have the relevant expertise. The story does a good job here, articulating what makes this treatment novel and how it works relative to other immunotherapy treatments. The story goes well beyond any news release.

A:
First gene therapy — ‘a true living drug’ — on the cusp of FDA approval
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