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: Such a test could initially be used to select patients for clinical trials of experimental treatments being developed to try to halt progression of Alzheimer’s, the researchers said, and may one day move into routine use in doctors’ clinics. “Alzheimer’s begins to affect the brain many years before patients are diagnosed (and) many of our drug trials fail because by the time patients are given the drugs the brain has already been too severely affected,” said Simon Lovestone of Oxford University, who led this work from King’s College London. “A simple blood test could help us identify patients at a much earlier stage to take part in new trials and hopefully develop treatments,” he said. Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, a brain-wasting disease which in 2010 was estimated to be costing the world $604 billion a year. The fatal disease affects 44 million people worldwide, with the number set to triple by 2050, the campaign group Alzheimer’s Disease International says. Several big pharma firms including Roche, Eli Lilly, Merck & Co and Johnson & Johnson, are pursuing various approaches to get to the root cause of Alzheimer’s and try to find treatments to halt its progression. Yet over the past 15 years, more than 100 experimental Alzheimer’s drugs have failed in trial. Lovestone and other experts believe this may be because drug trials are conducted too late, in patients whose condition has already gone too far. A predictive test for use before people develop symptoms would help researchers select the right people for drug trials, and help show whether the experimental drugs are working. Previous studies have found that PET brain scans and tests of lumbar fluid can be used to predict the onset of dementia from people with a less severe condition known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), but these tests are expensive and invasive, so scientists are keen to develop a cheaper, simpler blood test. MCI includes problems with day-to-day memory, language and attention. It can be an early sign of dementia, or a symptom of stress or anxiety. Around 10 percent of people diagnosed with MCI develop dementia within a year. Apart from regular assessments to measure memory decline, there is currently no accurate way of predicting who will or won’t develop dementia. For this study, published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, Lovestone’s team used blood samples from 1,148 people - 476 with Alzheimer’s, 220 with mild cognitive impairment and 452 elderly controls without dementia. They were analyzed for 26 proteins previously found to be linked with Alzheimer’s. The team found 16 of these 26 proteins to be strongly associated with brain shrinkage in either MCI or Alzheimer’s and then ran a second series of tests to see which of these could predict which patients would progress from MCI to Alzheimer’s. With this second series, they found a combination of 10 proteins capable of predicting with 87 percent accuracy whether people with MCI would develop Alzheimer’s disease within a year. Experts in the field welcomed the results but said they should be replicated in larger studies before an Alzheimer’s blood test could be rolled out for use in doctors’ clinics. “The results reported today are interesting, but as the authors point out there is still a very large amount of work remaining until a usable blood test for Alzheimer’s disease becomes available,” said Adrian Pini of the MRC Center for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s College London. James Pickett, head of research at the Alzheimer’s Society, said the research “does not mean that a blood test for dementia is just around the corner”. “These 10 proteins can predict conversion to dementia with less than 90 percent accuracy, meaning one in 10 people would get an incorrect result,” he said. “Accuracy would need to be improved before it could be a useful diagnostic test.” Claim: Study paves the way for a blood test to predict Alzheimer's.

SOLUTION: British scientists have identified a set of 10 proteins in the blood that can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s and call this an important step towards developing a test for the incurable brain-wasting disease.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: Plaintiffs Russell Geissler, Bernard Bagley and Willie James Jackson filed a lawsuit in 2017 against the Department of Corrections over a lack of treatment for hepatitis C. A proposed class-action settlement was submitted after the lawsuit was filed. “This is a major step toward eliminating a point source for hepatitis C,” class counsel Reuben Guttman, with the law firm Guttman, Buschner & Brooks, said in a press release. Judge Margaret Seymour gave the proposed settlement the preliminary approval, news outlets reported. Identifying and treating inmates with hepatitis C will cost between $4,000 and $15,000 per person, depending on the individual’s health. The agency began testing current and former inmates in 2018. The department also received $10 million in its 2019-2020 budget to cover drugs, staffing, equipment and other expenses related to the testing and treatment for hepatitis C.  Testing for all 18,125 South Carolina inmates is on schedule to be completed by June. The agency’s director, Bryan Stirling, said this a big step toward providing inmates with a safe environment. “We know that about 85% of inmates return to society within five years, and this will save medical treatment costs for taxpayers in the long run,” Stirling said. Hepatitis C is a viral infection that is spread through exposure to blood or blood products, commonly through sharing needles during intravenous drug use. Claim: Mandated hep C treatment for SC inmates gets initial consent.

SOLUTION: A  federal judge granted preliminary approval Tuesday of a proposed settlement mandating testing and treatment for hepatitis C of all inmates in South Carolina correction facilities.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: Turkey reported its first infection just over two weeks ago. Since then, a surge in cases to 3,629 has outstripped rates in most other countries and the government has fallen short of its target to conduct 10,000 tests per day. In interviews with Reuters, experts have urged stronger stay-at-home orders and some said it was risky for Ankara to export 500,000 kits to the United States only to turn around and order a million more from China. “Our test numbers are low. We were certainly not prepared. Countries that are ready must have high test numbers,” said Sinan Adiyaman, chairman of the Turkish Medics Association (TTB). The government has said it took timely measures to delay the outbreak. But Adiyaman said Turkey was slow on some steps, including suspending sports leagues and quarantining those coming from abroad, especially the thousands returning this month from an Umrah pilgrimage. “Around 200,000 people arrived from abroad since the outbreak began, and they were just given a simple fever test and released across Turkey in an uncontrolled manner,” he said. “You cannot fight a pandemic this way.”  The coronavirus has so far killed 75 people in Turkey, an international crossroads with one of the world’s biggest airports in Istanbul. About 40,000 tests have been done including about 7,000 in the last 24 hours, suggesting Turkey is edging toward the target Health Minister Fahrettin Koca set out a week ago, but only two-thirds of the way there. South Korea, seen as the global leader, does more tests each day than Turkey’s total. (Click here here for a graphic of global tests; click here here for its global spread.) To contain the virus, Ankara has closed schools, cafes and bars, banned mass prayers, and suspended sports matches and flights. President Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey, which has a population of about 83 million, would overcome the outbreak in two to three weeks. Mustafa Cankurtaran, head of geriatrics at the Hacettepe University Faculty of Medicine, said his team is following the national guidelines, testing only “risky” patients with cough and fever. But next month will be critical since the outbreak will widen, he said. Earlier this week Koca said the kits sent to the United States were locally produced PCR tests for the coronavirus. He said Turkey had a monthly production capacity of 2 million tests, and added that the tests purchased from China were “rapid tests”, not PCR. The TTB’s Adiyaman said sending the test kits jeopardised the health of the public and medical personnel. “Exporting testing kits to the United States as Turkey needs them and while they need to be used here will be an unforgivable mistake,” he said. Irshad Shaikh, the World Health Organisation’s health security program Leader in Turkey, said the country now had little room for error and must test everyone who has had contact with the virus. He said, however, that the export of test kits to the United States, which he said was in a “perilous situation,” could be seen as a form of capital investment. “From now on, it’s a very slippery slope and razor-thin margin moving forward,” he said. “Now if the U.S. succeeds in vaccine development, we already have our invested cash in the bank in the form of our IOUs,” Shaikh told Reuters. Among the containment measures, Ankara said it quarantined Muslims returning from Umrah in Saudi Arabia. But Nihat Gonul, the local administrator of a village in  Sakarya province some 120 km east of Istanbul, said two returning pilgrims continued their lives normally and attended gatherings for days before authorities came to quarantine them. “There is this atmosphere of uncertainty in the village. People are scared, not sure what to think,” Gonul said. Claim: Turkey struggles to ramp up tests as outbreak reaches critical phase.

SOLUTION:
A week after sending half a million coronavirus test kits to the United States, Turkey is struggling to ramp up its own testing for the disease as doctors warn the country has reached a  crossroads in containing the fast-growing outbreak.