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: "Pitching for a bump in the minimum wage, a labor leader suggested a hike could save all Texans money by elevating low-income workers who’d no longer need government help. We don’t know about that. But we flipped on the Texas Truth-O-Meter after John Patrick, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, said at a January 2017 Capitol press conference: ""If you have a family, the current minimum wage easily qualifies you for food stamps."" Really? ""Food stamps"" is an outdated term referring to food benefits available to income-eligible residents through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Beneficiaries purchase food and groceries using electronic benefit transfer cards. Nationally on average in 2015, about 45.8 million people in 22.5 million households monthly participated in SNAP, according to the federal government, and because benefits are available to most low-income households, participants represent a broad cross-section of the nation's poor. A November 2016 U.S. Department of Agriculture report states that in the year, 55 percent of SNAP households with children included people with jobs. Still, the average gross income of participating households was $786 a month, the report says, which breaks out to $9,432 a year. We asked the Texas AFL-CIO for the basis of Patrick’s claim. By email, spokesman Ed Sills said a full-time minimum-wage Texas worker earns $7.25 an hour (identical to the federal minimum). Multiplied over 2,000 work hours in a year, that’s an annual income of approximately $14,500. The labor group’s use of 2,000 hours in a work year contrasts with the 2,087-hour work year used by the federal government in its data assumptions. Using that figure, a single full-time worker would earn $15,130 in a year. Sills otherwise said that according to maximum monthly income limits posted by the state, a family could easily qualify for SNAP with a single worker earning the minimum wage. He pointed out the relevant chart, posted on a Texas Health and Human Services Commission web page titled  ""SNAP Food Benefits."" We proceeded to crunch the figures, which mostly supported Patrick’s claim, though we also noticed Patrick hadn’t said if he was thinking solely of families with one full-time minimum-wage worker; Sills told us by phone that he believed so. A twist Then came a twist causing us to realize the commission-posted figures were out of date. We recognized as much when Christine Mann, a commission press officer, responded to our inquiry about Patrick’s claim by providing SNAP-eligibility household income thresholds lower than the thresholds on the agency’s SNAP food benefits web page--which Mann told us would be updated. Mann later provided a commission web link to the up-to-date income eligibility figures. For our part, we spotted the same income-eligibility numbers on a USDA web page that describes the figures as in effect for the fiscal year running through September 2017. Mann’s response also indicated that qualifying for SNAP is more complicated than simply grossing less than a particular threshold. ""Eligibility for SNAP is based on household size, the countable amount of gross and net income for all mandatory household members, and allowed deductions"" for items including shelter, utilities, child care and medical expenses, Mann wrote. Agency confirmation Mann otherwise told us that a single minimum-wage full-time worker in a household of two to three people would draw monthly gross income of $1,255.70. In support of Patrick’s claim, that amount runs short of the up-to-date income thresholds to qualify for SNAP of $1,736 a month for a two-person household or $2,184 a month for a three-person household. Bigger households with a single full-time minimum-wage worker would qualify too, we calculated, as would households of four or more with two full-time minimum-wage workers. We identified one exception: A household of three with two full-time minimum-wage workers, which would have a combined gross monthly income of $2,511.40, would earn too much to qualify for SNAP at the qualifying gross-income threshold of $2,184 a month for a household of three. We separately asked the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, which says it advocates for conditions enabling every Texan to be healthy, well-educated and financially secure, to assess Patrick’s statement. By email, Oliver Bernstein described calculations like our own; he said the claim holds up. Our ruling Patrick said that in Texas, ""if you have a family, the current minimum wage easily qualifies you for food stamps."" Our finding is that a household of two or more residents including a single full-time minimum-wage worker would clearly qualify for SNAP as would a household of four or more with two full-time minimum-wage workers. A three-person household with two such workers would gross too much to qualify. – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Claim: If you have a family, the current minimum wage easily qualifies you for food stamps.

Answer: "Patrick said that in Texas, ""if you have a family, the current minimum wage easily qualifies you for food stamps."" Our finding is that a household of two or more residents including a single full-time minimum-wage worker would clearly qualify for SNAP as would a household of four or more with two full-time minimum-wage workers. A three-person household with two such workers would gross too much to qualify."


Question: Paragraph: Muskegon resident Pamela Anderson said that after hearing about numerous cases, she started a Facebook group about cancer deaths among people who live or have lived near the Butterworth landfill site in Grand Rapids. They plan to bring up the issue at a city commission meeting this week, the Grand Rapids Press reported . The group recently met with Kent County Health Department epidemiologist Brian Hartl, who advised them to collect more information on cancer rates in the area. “If there are rare forms of cancer, or cancers we’re seeing affect a young population, it might trigger further investigation,” Hartl said. But he cautioned that cancer is difficult to study, and that it can take years and multiple triggers to emerge. “Especially in small areas like a neighborhood or a block, it makes it challenging to connect it to environmental exposure,” Hartl said. “Most cancers are due to lifestyle choices, not environmental factors.” The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that theoretical cancer and health risks from the landfill exist, but that they’re limited to regular direct contact with the waste over several decades. The agency conducted a site cleanup in 1999, and removed material contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyl and chromium. The EPA said there is no current exposure at the site. “A lot of those kids in the ’60s and ’70s used to play in the dump,” said Shane Smith, who grew up down the street from Anderson in the Indiana Avenue neighborhood. “It was just starting to alarm to us, because my dad’s entire generation passed away from cancer.” Anderson said she’s having the soil tested for contaminants at a home in the same neighborhood. ___ Information from: The Grand Rapids Press, http://www.mlive.com/grand-rapids Claim: Residents investigate cancer rates near Michigan landfill.

Answer: A group of residents is investigating cancer rates in a western Michigan neighborhood that’s near a contaminated landfill classified as a Superfund site.


Question: Paragraph: Homebred beef cattle are seen at a local cattle market in Hongseong, about 170 km (106 miles) south of Seoul July 29, 2008. A rare genetic mutation may underlie some cases of mad cow disease in cattle and its discovery may help shed light on where the epidemic started, U.S. researchers reported on Friday. REUTERS/Lee Jae-Won The mutation, in an Alabama cow that tested positive in 2006 for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is identical to one that causes a related brain-wasting disease in humans. This suggests BSE may sometimes arise spontaneously in cattle. Jurgen Richt of Kansas State University said cattle producers must never let down their guard against BSE because cattle anywhere, at any time, can develop the disease. The finding may support a 2005 theory that the BSE epidemic in cattle could be traced to feed contaminated with cattle remains from India, the researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens. BSE or mad cow disease swept through British dairy herds in the 1980s, forcing the destruction of millions of animals. No one ever found where it came from but most experts thought at the time it came from cattle feed that contained the remains of sheep infected with a similar disease called scrapie. Cattle were never known to develop BSE before the epidemic, but some experts have argued they may have. This report lends credence to that idea. BSE, scrapie and a human version called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, are brain-destroying illnesses called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. In some cases, animals or people that eat brain and nervous system material from victims of these diseases can develop them, too. They are passed along by misfolded infectious protein fragments called prions. A very rare disease called variant CJD has been found in people who ate infected beef products. Fatal and incurable, it has affected just 167 people so far. Most countries now ban the use of meat and other parts from mammals in food for cattle. They also ban the use of potentially infectious tissues such as brain and spinal cord in human food. “There are tendencies around the world, now that the feed-borne epidemic has gone down, to relax these rules and regulations,” Richt said in a telephone interview. “So if we have these genetic cases popping up here and there and we don’t have our mitigations in place, we will have another epidemic somewhere.”   He suggested breeding the gene out of cattle. “We can clean the world cattle herd of that mutation,” Richt said. CJD is also known to pop up spontaneously in the human population. A genetic mutation causes the disease in one in a million people globally. Richt and colleagues tested the brain of the Alabama cow and found a mutation identical to the prion gene mutation that causes some cases of CJD. It is probably rare in cattle, found in fewer than one in 2,000, they said in the report, published here  But the animal passed along its mutation to its heifer, which suggests it is inherited. Claim: Gene mutation underlies some mad cow disease: study.

Answer:
A rare genetic mutation may underlie some cases of mad cow disease in cattle and its discovery may help shed light on where the epidemic started, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.