TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: Paragraph: In May 2020, a photograph started to circulate on social media supposedly showing a petri dish that was coughed on by a person not wearing a mask and a petri dish coughed on by the same person wearing a mask:  As the Twitter user noted, this image reportedly was taken by lab technician Katie Corley and shared to her public Facebook page. Corley’s original post was shared on May 6 along with a message to the “conspiracy theorists” who were refusing to wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic: Visual experiment for you conspiracy theorists: I coughed on two petri dishes, one while wearing a mask and one not. Shocking! The one on the left with no growth is the one I used a mask for! The one on the right where I didn’t wear a mask is full of bacteria. So yeah, maybe cloth masks don’t give you much protection, but they protect the people around you. Maybe wear one if you insist it’s your constitutional right to eat at Chili’s. We note that many social media users who encountered this photograph made some incorrect assumptions about what it showed. For example, many people seemed to think that the petri dish on the right showed SARS-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus at the center of the current pandemic, and that this photograph demonstrated just how effective masks were at stopping the spread of COVID-19. This photograph, however, simply shows “normal oral flora.”   In an edit to her post, Corley explained that the petri dish on the right contained “normal oral flora,” such as staph species, neisseria species, and corynebacterium. Corley also noted that viruses are much smaller than the bacterium shown in the petri dish, but noted that this small experiment demonstrated how masks can lessen droplet spread that can carry viruses. Corley added: There’s been a lot of questions regarding this experiment, so here’s some answers: 1. I used a cloth mask I made myself with disposable lab coat material. 2. I used blood agar. 3. The plate on the right looks “old” or “stale” because of the growth. Some of the organisms on this plate are alpha hemolytic, meaning they partially hemolyze blood. The agar itself is made with 5% sheep’s blood, so when it’s partially hemolyzed, it turns a dark green color. 4. As for the growth, it’s mostly viridans strep, staph species (not staph aureus), neisseria species, and corynebacterium. Pretty normal oral flora. 5. I realize that viruses are 1,000 times smaller than bacteria. The point of the masks is to prevent droplet spread, which carry bacteria as well as viruses. Corley, of course, was not the first person to notice how face masks lessened droplet transmission. Similar images showing bacteria from a person’s cough growing in a petri dish can also be seen in this article from the Microbiology Society. Rich Davis, the Clinical Microbiology Lab Directory at Providence Sacred Heart, posted a series of images of a similar demonstration: What does a mask do? Blocks respiratory droplets coming from your mouth and throat. Two simple demos: First, I sneezed, sang, talked & coughed toward an agar culture plate with or without a mask. Bacteria colonies show where droplets landed. A mask blocks virtually all of them. pic.twitter.com/ETUD9DFmgU — Rich Davis, PhD, D(ABMM), MLS 🦠🔬🧫 (@richdavisphd) June 26, 2020  Davis, like Corley, emphasized that this was not an experiment showing the efficacy of masks against the spread of COVID-19. Rather, it was a simple demonstration to show how masks lessened the spread of respiratory droplets, which can carry the disease. The British children’s television show “Operation Ouch!” also took a look at how much bacteria gets disseminated when a person coughs. While that episode did not include masks, it did compare a petri dish that was coughed on by a man with no mouth covering and a petri dish that was coughed on by a man who covered his mouth with an elbow. Here’s how the petri dish looked after it was coughed on by the man who covered his mouth (left) and the petri dish coughed on by the man who didn’t (right). As you can see, the results from “Operation Ouch!” are very similar to the results seen in Corley’s post:  Here’s the clip from “Operation Ouch!” (The cough experiment starts around the 50-second mark): A 2005 study published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology noted that more than 700 bacterial species have been detected in the oral cavity. Covering your mouth when you cough (either with an elbow or a mask) can reduce droplet transmission and lessen the spread of potentially harmful germs. Professor Lindsay Grayson, director of infectious diseases at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital, said as much during a presentation at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco in 2009 concerning research on the effectiveness of masks in slowing the spread of influenza. The New York Times reported: “If you’re wearing a mask to prevent yourself from catching it, they’re not so effective,” said Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne and one of the study’s co-authors. “But if you’re sick with the flu and coughing and sputtering, those masks do prevent you from spraying those bugs everywhere.” The researchers asked nine study subjects with documented cases of influenza type A or B to test two different types of masks — the standard, disposable surgical masks and a more costly, respirator-style mask. The flu patients coughed into a petri dish while wearing both types of mask as well as without the mask. The dish was then tested for the presence of flu virus. When either type of mask was worn, no virus was detected on the petri dish. But how effective are masks in preventing the spread of COVID-19? While the exact efficacy of masks on the spread of COVID-19 is still undetermined, health officials do recommend that people wear masks in public because these face coverings can prevent droplet transmission. Claim: A photograph shows one petri dish that was coughed on by a person not wearing a mask and another petri dish coughed on by the same person wearing a mask. 

SOLUTION: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told us:

PROBLEM: Paragraph: Virtually unknown just months ago, New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Los Angeles as a rising political star, about a month after her improbable upset of 10-term U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley in a New York City Democratic primary. On Thursday, she intentionally avoided politicians and Hollywood celebrities, instead choosing to share the stage at the low-dollar fundraiser with activists pushing for broader rent-control laws in California and a public-backed banking system in the city. In her speech, she warned of a broken economy in which luxury apartments stand vacant while homeless crowd the streets, and talked of a Democratic Party in which the working class and marginalized are ascendant. Bursts of applause followed her calls for universal health care and a cost-free education through college. She swiped repeatedly, if indirectly, at President Donald Trump. “It is not us who are crazy, not with that man in the White House,” the former Bernie Sanders organizer said to cheers. Ocasio-Cortez was lauded by those who paid $27, or $10 for students, to see the candidate seen as the new face of the emerging democratic socialist movement. “She really inspires me, because she’s so young and she’s getting so far,” said Melainey Jane Foerster, 16, a high-school student from suburban Santa Clarita. Salesman Jon Pelzer, 65, said he’s “impressed by and energized by what she was able to do in New York.” “We share all the same values,” added Pelzer, a Democrat who ran on a similar platform in California’s 30th Congressional District but didn’t advance to November. The surprise victory by the political novice in a district that includes parts of the Bronx and Queens came after a low-budget campaign that she built around liberal and social causes, not the traditional Democratic Party machine. Crowley had been expected to win easily. Her platform includes expanding the Medicare program to people of all ages and abolishing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Her trip to California comes at a time when state and national Democrats have been contending with friction between their establishment and liberal wings. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is being challenged in November by a fellow Democrat, state Sen. Kevin de Leon, who has positioned himself as a liberal alternative to the long-serving centrist. She warned of the influence of “coastal elites” in politics, and she recalled that her candidacy was largely dismissed. Ocasio-Cortez said she didn’t receive an endorsement from any incumbent “but we won anyway.” She urged the crowd to “engage in the fights that you know that are right.” Claim: Rising liberal Democrat star on West Coast fundraising swing.

SOLUTION: She visited Los Angeles’ notorious Skid Row neighborhood, where the homeless crowd the streets. She met with liberal activists eager to see universal health care and expanded rent-control laws. And she was cheered by hundreds of supporters at a downtown fundraiser, where she warned of those who scheme to turn liberal-minded Americans against each other.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: President and CEO James R. Downing told doctors and media that the St. Jude Global program’s goal is ambitious — to influence the care of as much as 30 percent of children with cancer worldwide in the next decade. He said he hopes the investment will improve access and quality of medical care for many children who might otherwise die. More than 80 percent of children with cancer live in low- and middle-income countries, where they lack access to adequate diagnosis and treatment, St. Jude said. The majority of those children will die, said Dr. Carlos Rodriguez-Galindo, director of St. Jude Global. In developed nations, survival rates for pediatric cancers exceed 80 percent. “We must address this gap,” Downing said. Founded by actor Danny Thomas, St. Jude is considered a leading researcher of cancer and other life-threatening diseases that affect children. It shares its research with hospitals, doctors and health programs worldwide. Families with children being cared for at the hospital never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing and food. St. Jude is expanding its International Outreach Program, which was founded in 1993 and presently includes 24 hospitals in 17 countries. The hospital’s Department of Global Pediatric Medicine, formed in 2016, accelerated the hospital’s global outreach. The department has created St. Jude Global, which aims to improve access to care and quality of treatment by focusing on education of medical workers and research. The global program will seek to strengthen health systems that are treating children with cancer and establish standards and guidelines to improve patient care. Hospital officials plan to form what they describe as a global alliance to help transfer knowledge across regions. “We have set a very bold goal,” Rodriguez-Galindo said. The hospital said that among several other nations, it is building relations in Russia, Myanmar, Cambodia and sub-Saharan Africa. Its research has already influenced medical care in the Philippines, where Dr. Mae Dolendo treats children with cancer in Davao City on the island of Mindanao. Dolendo said doctors from her cancer treatment facility have communicated regularly with St. Jude experts for the past 12 years. These experts have guided Dolendo on programs in leukemia treatment and nursing infectious diseases. Her cancer institute has increased from four beds to 50 beds with the help of St. Jude. “Children from all over Mindanao come to us, some being carried in hammocks, some taking outrigger boats, some traveling for eight hours by bus, just to get pediatric cancer treatment,” Dolendo said. The overall survival rate was less than 10 percent in 2004, Dolendo said. It is now 50 percent. “This is the impact of St. Jude to us,” she said. Claim: St. Jude: $100M for children with cancer global outreach.

SOLUTION:
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has helped with the treatment of thousands of cancer-stricken children around the world. Striving to reach so many more, the Memphis, Tennessee-based hospital announced a $100 million plan Thursday to expand its global outreach.