TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis issued statements saying they will vote against Dourson to serve as head of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Environmentalists and Senate Democrats have vehemently opposed Dourson, a toxicologist with close ties to the chemical industry. That means only one more Republican “no” vote would likely be needed to torpedo his nomination. Moderate GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told reporters Thursday she is also leaning against supporting Dourson, but has not yet made a final decision. The White House and EPA did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday or Thursday. Despite the fact he hasn’t yet been confirmed by the Senate, Dourson has already been working at the agency as a senior adviser to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. The agency’s press office did not respond to emails seeking how much he is being paid. The Associated Press reported in September that Dourson has for years accepted payments for criticizing studies that raised concerns about the safety of his clients’ products, according to a review of financial records and his published work. Past corporate clients of Dourson and of a research group he ran include Dow Chemical Co., Koch Industries Inc. and Chevron Corp. His research has also been underwritten by industry trade and lobbying groups representing the makers of plastics, pesticides, processed foods and cigarettes. Burr and Tillis, both of whom are considered reliably pro-business conservatives, cited Dourson’s past work and worries among their home-state constituents about tainted drinking water in opposing his nomination. “Over the last several weeks, Senator Tillis has done his due diligence in reviewing Mr. Dourson’s body of work,” said a statement from Tillis’ office. “Senator Tillis still has serious concerns about his record and cannot support his nomination.” Marine veterans and their families blame decades-old contamination of wells at a North Carolina base with solvents and dry-cleaning chemicals for infant deaths and serious health problems that include cancer. More recently, concerns have been raised about undisclosed discharges of chemicals used to manufacture Teflon and GoreTex into the Cape Fear River, a source of municipal drinking water for Wilmington and other southeastern North Carolina communities. Dourson worked at the EPA for more than a decade, leaving in 1994 as the manager at a lab that assessed the health risks of exposure to chemicals. The following year, he founded Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, a private toxicity evaluation nonprofit organization that tests chemicals and produces reports on which chemicals are hazardous in what quantities. Dourson’s views toward industry are consistent with others Trump has selected as top federal regulators. Among them is Pruitt, who in March overruled the findings of his agency’s own scientists to reverse an effort to ban chlorpyrifos, one of the nation’s most widely used pesticides. Court records show Dourson and his work have often been called on when his corporate clients are seeking to fend off lawsuits. DuPont was accused of polluting a West Virginia town with Perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a chemical that the company’s internal tests had long ago concluded was toxic. Corporate officials discussed hiring Dourson as part of a strategy to defend themselves. Dourson led a team that found in 2002 that PFOA levels up to 150 parts per billion were safe, a level higher than was found in testing of 188 private wells and springs. That was also well above the 1 part per billion that Dupont’s own scientists had concluded could be considered safe years before. The EPA now says that only 70 parts per trillion of PFOA are acceptable — or only 0.05 percent of what Dourson’s team said was safe. DuPont and a former subsidiary, Chemours Co., later paid $761 million to settle 3,550 lawsuits stemming from its use of the chemical. Chemours is the company whose spills of a chemical called GenX, a replacement for PFOA, are now at issue in North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. “I will not be supporting the nomination of Michael Dourson,” said Burr, the state’s senior senator. “With his record and our state’s history of contamination at Camp Lejeune as well as the current GenX water issues in Wilmington, I am not confident he is the best choice for our country.” The stand was quickly praised by environmental advocacy groups that rarely find common ground with the two Tarheel Republicans. “No one who has spent decades arguing on behalf of the chemical industry for weaker safety standards should be charged with reviewing chemicals for the EPA,” said Scott Faber, a senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “It would be like putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department.” ___ Follow Associated Press environmental reporter Michael Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck

SOLUTION: Trump EPA nominee opposed by GOP senators from NC.

PROBLEM: Igor is a 13-year old tiger living in the zoo in the southern Hungarian town of Szeged. It has been suffering from hip joint pains for years. The treatment, used more widely on humans than animals, cures injured joints with tissue taken from patients’ own fatty tissue, which contains regenerative stem cells, doctors said. These are injected back into the ailing joints. “The essence of stem-cell treatment is that we can achieve an improvement in the quality of life of patients who cannot be helped by operations or medical treatment,” said Robert Gippert, the veterinarian who operated on Igor’s hip. “Just like in humans, the worn out joint of Igor the tiger will heal due to the regenerative and self-healing effects of stem cells, without the use of external materials,” he added. The sedated tiger was lying peacefully on its side on the operating table, with its big paws sticking out from below a green blanket. After Igor wakes up, it could take two to three weeks before vets can judge the improvement in its movement.

SOLUTION: Igor the Siberian tiger gets stem-cell hip treatment in Hungary.

PROBLEM: A boy suffering from HIV/AIDS smiles as he waits to receive a vaccine 'Pneumovax' during a vaccination program on the outskirts of the northeastern Indian city of Siliguri, August 5, 2008. REUTERS/Rupak De Chowdhuri The group, known as IAVI, released a blueprint for how to proceed at an international meeting of AIDS experts and activists in Mexico City. Dr. Seth Berkley, president and chief executive officer of IAVI, said the failure last year of a high-profile Merck and Co experimental shot should not mean the end of the quest — even though some experts have been calling for an end to expensive AIDS vaccine trials. “Developing an AIDS vaccine may take more time and innovation than we might have once imagined, but we are confident that science will prevail. The necessary direction for the field is clear,” Berkley said. More than 25 years since the AIDS epidemic started, there is no vaccine against the fatal and incurable virus, although more than 20 drugs are on the market to help control its symptoms. The human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS is especially tricky to vaccinate against because it easily evades immune defenses and mutates constantly. Berkley said it is not unexpected for a vaccine to take decades to develop and he thinks HIV can be beaten. “We have got to create this new mechanism to be able to turn the AIDS vaccine into a normal product development initiative so that every time there a failure, it doesn’t raise the question of whether this is the end of the line,” Berkley said in a telephone interview. For instance, the IAVI blueprint notes it took 25 years to create a vaccine against the human papilloma virus or HPV, which causes cervical cancer, and there are still no vaccines against tuberculosis or malaria. “Strong scientific evidence in both humans and animal models suggests that developing an AIDS vaccine is possible,” said IAVI’s Dr. Wayne Koff. If money is steered away from testing vaccines just to see if they work, an expensive proposition, it might free up resources to solve the trickier scientific roadblocks, Berkley said. IAVI’S plan calls for solving the scientific challenges to make an AIDS vaccine, such as finding a way to activate the two arms of the human immune system against the virus. The vaccine must generate neutralizing antibodies — immune system proteins that flag and attack invaders such as viruses, as well as so-called cell-mediated immunity — the T-cells that directly attack invaders. “Before vaccines go into efficacy trials they need to go through a set of screenings to look at evidence they are significantly better,” Berkley said. It might be possible to improve a vaccine’s power by using things like another type of virus to carry the vaccine into the body, Berkley said. “We are pushing a whole new generation of vectors. We have got candidates coming down the pipeline on that,” he said. The approach mirrors one being taken by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health, to funnel spending more to lab work and animal tests rather than expensive large-scale vaccine trials on humans. The nonprofit IAVI is helping to test five vaccines along with the National Institutes of Health, academic research institutions and companies such as Targeted Genetics, Therion Biologics, Crucell NV and GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals.

SOLUTION:
New AIDS vaccine blueprint calls for more focus.