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: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that officials are urging at-risk people, such as recreational drug users and the homeless, to get vaccinated. The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services said Wednesday that the state has recorded 414 cases in 35 counties since September 2017, mostly in the southeast part of the state. Only about 10 cases per year were reported before then. Health officials say the virus has sent 233 people to the hospital and caused two deaths. Hepatitis A is a viral infection. It usually spreads when a person ingests the virus from objects, food or drinks contaminated by undetected amounts of stool from an infected person. ___ Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com Claim: Health officials raise concerns about hepatitis A outbreak.

SOLUTION: Officials are raising concerns that a hepatitis A outbreak in Missouri could worsen if the liver disease spreads to urban areas.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: The research was released Monday as the state started its first statewide campaign to prevent the disease. The most recent case came out of Hilo, where a resident contracted the disease in late November. Department of Health officials suspect the Big Island patient accidentally ingested an infected slug while drinking from a garden house. People contract the disease by ingesting food contaminated with snails or slugs that carry parasitic larvae from rat droppings. The state’s $300,000 campaign will include a series of television and radio announcements urging people to wash fruits and vegetables before eating them to avoid the potentially debilitating disease, which affects the brain and spinal cord. The Legislature earlier this year granted the Health Department $1 million over the next two years to control the spread of rat lungworm. There were 18 laboratory-confirmed cases in Hawaii this year. The Big Island has seen the most cases at 11, followed by Maui at six. Sue Jarvi, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, said the recent study shed light on how common the disease is in rats. Jarvi said rats near Hilo Harbor and Hilo International Airport are especially worrisome because some end up getting transported to the mainland and other countries, potentially exporting rat lungworm. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UH-Hilo and researchers in Thailand are all reviewing parasites that were collected, Jarvi said. “The risk of rat lungworm disease is present on all islands and there are basic steps we can take each day to reduce this risk and help prevent infection,” said Keith Kawaoka, the department’s deputy director of environmental health. “Knowledge is the best defense we can provide people with to collectively protect our communities from rat lungworm disease in Hawaii.” Claim: Hawaii launches campaign to prevent spread of rat lungworm.

SOLUTION: Almost 94 percent of rats in the Hilo region are infected with the parasite that causes rat lungworm disease, a recent study on the meningitis-like disease showed.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: The European Union is trying to nurse its fish stocks back to health after decades of over-exploitation. Deep-sea fish are particularly vulnerable as they reproduce so slowly. The ministers’ decision late on Monday affected just 80 million euros ($104 million) worth of fish, but was seen as an important test case in a series of bruising encounters with European Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki. Damanaki, who started her political career in a 1973 uprising against the then Greek dictatorship, has pledged to put the long-term health of fisheries ahead of short-term profits. Earlier this month, fishing nations led by France rejected her advice that bluefin tuna catches should be halved to give the species a fair chance of survival. In the event, quotas were cut by 4 percent. At Monday’s meeting, catch quotas for deep-sea sharks were set at zero, with zero tolerance from 2012 for the sale of sharks netted while trawling for other species. But conservationists, including WWF and the Pew group, said many sharks would still be scooped up accidentally, then dumped overboard, particularly by French and Spanish boats trawling the deep seabed northwest of Scotland and Ireland. The Atlantic’s main scientific authority, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), says all northeast Atlantic deep-sea species are fished beyond safe biological limits. Ministers admitted that the ICES advice, and that of the EU’s own experts, was worrying. “Both advices indicate that most deep-sea stocks are in a precarious situation, and that fishing opportunities for those stocks, in order to assure their sustainability, should be reduced,” they said in a statement. But worries about the livelihoods of fishermen — mainly French, Spanish and Portuguese — prevented deeper quota cuts. “In spite of several years of commitments to the U.N. to manage deep-sea fisheries sustainably, EU ministers failed to deliver,” said Matthew Gianni of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. “Deep-sea fishing will continue at more or less the same level as in recent years to the detriment of deep-sea species and ecosystems,” said Gianni, who was a deep-sea trawlerman off California before the industry declined in the 90s. The ministers agreed to curb important deep-sea fisheries on the eastern continental slopes of the Atlantic in 2011-12: by up to 7.5 percent annually for black scabbardfish and 13 percent for roundnose grenadiers. Quotas for forkbeards and blue ling were unchanged. Fishermen land about 40,000 tonnes a year of about 70 species of deep-sea fish from the northeast Atlantic, representing about 1.2 percent of total EU fishing. Ministers agreed to continue a ban on fishing for orange roughy, a vulnerable, sluggish red fish that can live for more than 100 years. The orange roughy fishery only became commercialised about 25 years ago, as depletion of inshore species forced fishermen to search further offshore with new technology. Claim: Deep-sea sharks protected as EU sets fish quotas.

SOLUTION:
European fisheries ministers have agreed minor cuts to quotas for some vulnerable deep-sea fish and more stringent measures to protect rare sharks.