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.
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Question: Paragraph: A University of Iowa study shows the state’s contribution to the Gulf dead zone spiked 47 percent to 618 million pounds in 2016, based on five-year running annual averages. “Just based on water quality data, I think we can say we’ve not made much progress over the past 20 years in terms of nitrogen,” said Chris Jones, a research engineer at the UI’s IIHR-Hydroscience & Engineering. Environmentalists say the study raises new questions about the effectiveness of Iowa’s approach to improving water quality and its reliance on voluntary ag compliance. “We’ve been pouring state and federal money into cutting nutrient pollution for decades, and this highlights the fact that the voluntary approach is not working,” said Jennifer Terry, executive director of the Iowa Environmental Council. “We’re not headed in the right direction. ... We need to follow the lead of other states and pass some environmental laws that will actually reduce loads and result in cleaner water,” Terry said. The Des Moines Register reports that the news comes as Iowa marks the five-year anniversary of the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, a plan designed to cut by 45 percent the nitrogen and phosphorus levels that leave Iowa and feed Gulf hypoxia — or the dead zone. Oxygen levels within the zone are so low that marine life can no longer survive, threatening the Gulf’s seafood industry. Most of the nutrient losses come from farming, although the strategy also targets losses from urban wastewater and industrial operations. Last year, Iowa invested $420 million in those water quality improvements, including helping farmers plant cover crops, build terraces and tackle other conservation practices that hold nutrients in place. But farmers expanding their drainage tile systems — along with increasing hog, cattle and chicken feeding operations, which provide manure to fertilize crops — likely outweigh those conservation efforts, UI scientists say. The nutrient reduction practices “being implemented are a tiny, tiny portion of what needs to be done, and it’s occurring in a system that’s changing,” Jones said. “We appreciate all that is being done with nutrient management and conservation farming. Unfortunately, we’re just impacting too few acres with too few practices,” added Larry Weber, executive associate dean for UI’s College of Engineering. Jones wrote the study with Weber and Keith Schilling, another UI research engineer. Increased nutrient pollution in water creates problems for people and animals beyond the dead zone. High phosphorus levels can lead to toxic algae blooms that can befoul lakes, rivers and streams, potentially killing pets and making people ill. And the federal government limits the amount of nitrates in drinking water to 10 milligrams per liter. Higher levels can be fatal to babies under 6 months old. Increased levels translate to higher costs for utilities for nitrate removal. “We need a dramatic increase, a rapidly-scaled up increase in conservation practices and more funding,” said Cindy Lane, the Iowa Environmental Council’s water program director. Schilling said the study shows that targeting nutrient reduction investment in Iowa can have a significant impact downstream. “Iowa has a dominant role in this Gulf hypoxia issue,” Schilling said. “Let’s invest the resources here, where we really need it. “If we solve Iowa, we solve the Gulf,” he said. The UI study gives Iowans new information in the fight to reduce the nitrogen levels that flow from the state into the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, which make their way to the Gulf of Mexico. Looking at Iowa Department of Natural Resources data from 23 monitoring stations, the study shows Iowa on average over the past 18 years contributed 29 percent of the total nitrogen headed to the Gulf from the Mississippi-Atchafalaya river basin. The river basin is a massive watershed that includes all or part of 31 states. Iowa’s nitrogen impact was even greater in other watersheds. The state averaged 45 percent of the nitrogen levels going into the Upper Mississippi River basin, and 55 percent of the nitrogen going into to the Missouri River basin. “When you look at the entire Missouri (River) watershed, our land comprises 3.3 percent of the total area ... and Iowa contributes nearly 12 percent of the water,” Jones said. But “we contribute 55 percent of the nitrate,” he said. “The way that pencils out is that the amount of water coming from Iowa has seven times more nitrates than the rest of the Missouri River watershed,” Jones said. If Iowa’s contributions were removed, the Missouri River would have little nitrogen contributions in some years. “We really need to take seriously the Missouri River’s contribution as a driver for Gulf hypoxia,” Jones said. The growing concentration of livestock feeding operations in western Iowa might account for Iowa’s large contribution to the Missouri River nitrate levels, the scientists said. “People tend to dismiss livestock influences, but maybe there’s more to it than people give credit it for,” Schilling said, adding that it would require more study to determine the impact. Iowa’s nitrogen levels, based on running five-year annual averages, have been above the 2003 value for 10 consecutive years, the study says. The scientists say 2003 was the first year the five-year rolling average could be calculated, with data that starts in 1999. The goal of the Gulf Hypoxia Task Force, made up of federal, state and tribal leaders, “will be very difficult to achieve if nitrate retention cannot be improved in Iowa,” the report said. The task force, with Iowa Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig as chairman, seeks to reduce the dead zone to 1,900 square miles by 2035. The deadline was extended from 2015. Last year, the dead zone set a record, which, at 8,776 square miles, was more than four times the goal size. The report says about 90 percent of Iowa’s nitrogen levels “can be sourced to the 72 percent of the state’s land area that is in crop cultivation.” Iowa, an agriculture powerhouse, is a national leader in corn, soybean, pork, egg and beef production. “This intense production of carbohydrates and protein has resulted in the state being a leading contributor” to the nitrogen loads and Gulf hypoxia, the report said. Naig said farmers understand the important role they play in improving water quality and are scaling up efforts across the state “as we move from demonstration projects to larger, watershed-scale implementation projects. “We recognize that there is still a lot of work to be done, but we are on the right path,” said Naig, who adds farmers are working with more than 250 partners in 65 rural and urban demonstration projects. The UI scientists doubt that increased cropping is the reason for the increased nitrogen impact. Iowa’s cropped area has increased only 4 percent over the past 18 years, while other states’ farmed land has climbed 21 percent, particularly in Minnesota, North and South Dakota and Kansas. About 85 percent of Iowa’s acres are farmed, making it the fifth-highest in the nation, based on the 2012 U.S. Agriculture Census, so there are few acres left that can be brought into production compared with other states. “Iowa’s decline in the share of the region’s soybean area was especially pronounced, dropping from 18.6 percent in 1999 to 14.5 percent in 2016,” the report said. “One would expect our (nitrogen) contributions relative to the other areas would be diminished,” Jones said. “But the opposite has occurred.” Jones said it’s led the scientists to consider other factors. The scientists doubt that Iowa farmers are using significantly more fertilizer. “When we look at nitrogen sales data, it might change a little year over year. But on a per acre basis, that hasn’t changed a lot since 1990,” he said. And with little increase in corn and soybean acres, the scientists speculate that Iowa’s increased nitrogen levels could be coming from more drainage tiles. Or farmers could be using more manure as fertilizer from animal feeding operations. Without Iowa, the Gulf’s overall nitrate loads would have declined 43,400 tons over 18 years, based on five-year running annual averages, the scientists’ data show. Instead nitrate loads grew by 52,000 tons. “It’s pretty clear these loads from the Ohio basin have to be declining,” Jones said. “A lot that is coming from Indiana.” That state’s high level of cover crop adoption by farmers could be the reason, he said, and should be studied. Cover crops such as cereal rye slow the rate of water runoff, reduce erosion and improve soil fertility. Iowa also needs to honestly discuss the impact that drainage tiling has on nitrogen losses, Jones said. Iowa doesn’t collect data on how much underground drainage runs through the state, although officials estimate about 9 million acres are drained through tile. Environmentalists believe the number is much higher. Underground drainage tile helps improve yields by quickly removing excess water from fields. Iowa’s tiling system consists of a network of drainage lines that feed into large pipes. The massive network, first constructed in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, turned once swampy lands into some of the nation’s most productive farmland. But water quickly carried away by the tiling system misses cleansing that would naturally occur by filtering through soil or the roots of trees, shrubs and grasses in riparian buffers along streams. Des Moines Water Works unsuccessfully sued drainage districts in three north Iowa counties in 2015, claiming underground tiles funneled high levels of nitrates into the Raccoon River, a source of drinking water for 500,000 central Iowa residents. “We acknowledge that it’s important to track implemented conservation, and we encourage that,” Jones said. “But we also need to have the courage to talk about these things that drive the system in the other direction.” Terry said Iowa is “one of the most heavily tiled states in the nation,” and its 110-year-old law regulating the practice does little to protect water quality. ___ Information from: The Des Moines Register, http://www.desmoinesregister.com Claim: Study: Iowa nitrogen pollution in the water is getting worse.

Answer: Nitrogen pollution flowing out of Iowa to the Gulf of Mexico has grown by close to 50 percent over nearly two decades, a new report shows, despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent to stem nutrients entering the state’s waterways.


Question: Paragraph: U.S. Marines of Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines are silhouetted against the sunset during a joint patrol with Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers along Helmand river near the Camp Gorgak in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan, July 3, 2011. REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, analyzed medical records of 307,520 children of active-duty Army personnel, aged 5 to 17 years old. It found almost 17 percent of them exhibited mental health problems. “Children of parents who spent more time deployed between 2003 and 2006 fared worse than children whose parents were deployed for a shorter duration,” the study’s researchers wrote. The lead researcher was Alyssa Mansfield, who was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the time the study was conducted. The U.S. Army reported some 562,000 members in active duty and more than 570,000 children of such members in 2010. Just under two-thirds of all active-duty servicemen and women were married and 15 percent were raising children as single parents. The children whose parents deployed at least once, for an average of 11 months, as part of the U.S. Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan were especially likely to suffer from adjustment, behavioral, depressive or stress disorders than those whose parents never went to war, the study found. Boys were more likely to have mental health problems than girls, according to the report, which reviewed records for patients cared for at military medical facilities and at civilian facilities using military medical insurance. “We used to think about deployment as a single experience: I go, I’m away, it’s difficult and then I come back. Well, it’s a way of life in the military that deployments continue to occur and families have to manage the consequences,” said Dr. Stephen Cozza, psychiatry professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Cozza has studied the issue and wrote an editorial accompanying the report. “These are consequences that aren’t necessarily short-term,” he said. The challenges don’t necessarily end with the final return home, he said, as soldiers may bring back their own mental health issues which affect relationships with their children. Claim: Mental problems of soldiers' kids tied to wars.

Answer: The longer U.S. soldiers were deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, the more likely their children would be diagnosed with mental health problems, according to a study published Monday.


Question: Paragraph: "In his effort to pass a health care overhaul, President Barack Obama has enlisted help from a close ally — his wife, Michelle. On Sept. 18, 2009, the first lady gave a speech about the importance of health care reform to women, and cited several reasons she thinks the current system is gender-biased. This line caught our attention:     ""Women are affected because, as we heard, in many states, insurance companies can still discriminate because of gender,"" she said. ""And this is still shocking to me. These are the kind of facts that still wake me up at night. ... In some states, it is still legal to deny a woman coverage because she's been the victim of domestic violence."" Health reform bills under consideration by Congress would prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-exisiting conditions, an issue we've already  explored  ; we've also examined how  pregnancy can sometimes be  a basis to deny coverage, and how pre-exisiting conditions already lead to  health care rationing  by private health insurers. But we'd never heard domestic abuse could count as a pre-existing condition, so we decided to look into the claim. The issue first came to light in 1994, when a Pennsylvania woman was denied health, life and mortgage disability insurance because of domestic violence, according to the Women's Law Project. That group, along with the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, began advocating for legislation to expressly prohibit the practice. Since then, most states, including Pennsylvania, have adopted laws prohibiting the practice. But, as Mrs. Obama said in her speech, denying coverage due to a history of domestic abuse is still legal in some states. Those states are Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming, and the District of Columbia, according to the National Women's Law Center. The claim has become a  popular talking point  for groups supporting health care reform such as the Service Employees International Union. (It's been discussed so much recently that Arkansas, which had no prohibition, this year passed a law prohibiting discrimination against domestic violence victims.) A  Huffington Post story  about the laws last week prompted several states and insurance companies to say that the laws have been changed or that the companies don't treat domestic violence as a pre-existing condition. The North Carolina situation is a matter of some disagreement. Although the Women's Law Center says the practice is still allowed, state officials say they interpret the laws to mean it is not. Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney told the  Jackson Free Press  that he wanted to explore whether insurance companies were taking advantage of the law:     ""I've got to get some of my lawyers to do some research on this, but we have only six mandated (conditions that must be covered) in our state statues, and we have 25 or more optional coverages, but domestic abuse doesn't seem to be one of them. ... The whole situation is bad. Let's say a woman works with a company that had Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and she gets beat up in her house and Blue Cross says 'we're not covering you because getting beat up is your pre-existing condition.' That's terrible."" Meanwhile, Wyoming Department of Insurance staff attorney James Mitchell told the  Huffington Post  that state law does not expressly prohibit insurers from using domestic abuse as grounds to deny coverage, though he'd found no cases of the practice in his state. Mitchell's response raises an important point: Just because it's legal in some states for insurance companies to cite domestic violence as a pre-existing condition, it doesn't mean that insurance companies are actually taking advantage of the loophole. Back in the 1990s there was evidence that the practice was widespread. In 1994, a House Judiciary Committee panel conducted an informal survey and found that eight of the 16 largest insurers in the country used domestic violence as a factor in deciding coverage. And a year later, the Insurance Commission of Pennsylvania reported that a formal survey showed that 24 percent of accident, health and life insurers took domestic violence into account when deciding whether to issue and renew insurance policies. But that data is more than 10 years old, so we asked Lisa Codispoti, senior counsel for the National Women's Law Center, if insurance companies are still denying health care coverage based on domestic violence history. Examples are hard to come by, she said, because people who get coverage through an employer don't usually face exclusions about pre-existing condititions. Only people who apply for individual coverage would, she said. ""It's such a small number of people who apply for individual insurance,"" she said. ""And it's not like insurance companies have to tell you why you're being denied coverage."" Indeed, underwriting standards are private, said Nancy Durborow, health projects coordinator for the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, making it difficult for groups such as hers to find out how widespread the practice still is. ""This is very secretive stuff,"" she said. A spokesman for the association representing insurance companies told us he's not aware of any insurers that deny women coverage based on history of domestic abuse. And the group supports a proposal by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners that would fully prohibit the practice. ""No one should be denied coverage because they are victims of domestic abuse,"" said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans. We find that the first lady is correct that ""in some states, it is still legal to deny a woman coverage because she's been the victim of domestic violence."" Putting aside the disputed North Carolina law, there still are several other states — including Mississippi and Wyoming — that have no specific laws prohibiting the practice. It's important to note that we couldn't find this was happening on a widespread basis — or even just a little bit." Claim: In some states, it is still legal to deny a woman coverage because she's been the victim of domestic violence.

Answer:
Michelle Obama claims that domestic violence counts as a pre-exisiting condition in some states