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: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday posted data showing nearly 68,000 drug overdose deaths were reported last year. The number may go up as more investigations are completed, but the agency expects the tally will end up below 69,000. Overdose deaths had been climbing each year since 1990, topping 70,000 in 2017. The numbers were celebrated by the U.S. secretary of health and human services. “Lives are being saved, and we’re beginning to win the fight against this crisis,” Alex Azar wrote in a tweet. But the overdose death rate is still about seven times higher than it was a generation ago. “We’re still in a pretty sad situation that we need to address,” said Rebecca Haffajee, a University of Michigan researcher. Researchers do not believe this is the start of a dramatic decline. Data from the first months of this year likely will show that the decrease is not gaining steam, said Farida Ahmad of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. The improvement was driven by a drop in deaths from heroin and prescription painkillers. Those falls were offset somewhat by continuing growth in deaths involving a different opioid, fentanyl, as well as other drugs such cocaine and methamphetamines. Overdose deaths often involve more than one drug. The improvement is not uniform: Some states seem to be making dramatic progress, while deaths continue to rise in others. The preliminary CDC data suggested deaths last year were down by as many as 1,000 or more in Ohio and Pennsylvania — each seeing declines of about 20%. Meanwhile, deaths increased by about 17% in Missouri, which had more than 200 additional deaths. It can take months for authorities to complete toxicology tests and other elements of a death investigation involving drugs. And some states report faster than others. The CDC is expected to report more complete data later this year. The current overdose epidemic has killed more people than any other in U.S. history, and it had been on a soaring trajectory. From 2014 to 2017, overdose deaths jumped by 5,000 or more each year. Experts trace the epidemic’s origins to 1995 and the marketing of the prescription painkiller OxyContin. It was meant be safer and more effective than other prescription opioids, but some patients got hooked and found they could crush the tablets and snort or inject them to get high. Gradually, many turned to cheaper street drugs such as heroin and fentanyl. In 2015, heroin began causing more deaths than prescription painkillers or other drugs. In 2016, fentanyl and its close cousins became the biggest drug killer, and in 2018 they were involved in about 46% of the reported overdose deaths, according to the preliminary CDC data. Strategies to reduce drug overdose deaths have included tougher policing, treatment program expansions, policies to limit opioid painkiller prescriptions and wider distribution of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. Haffajee and other researchers are trying to figure out what measures are most responsible for the slight improvement. “It’s complicated because there are so many policies going on, and as an evaluator it’s very hard to separate them out and determine which is working,” she said. Valerie Hardcastle, a Northern Kentucky University administrator who oversees research and other work on local health issues, has seen the overdose epidemic play out in her region, near Cincinnati. She believes a major factor is Narcan, a nasal spray version of naloxone, that has been widely distributed through the efforts of philanthropists and local, state, and federal officials. “It’s fantastic that we have fewer deaths, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “But I’m not sure it’s an indication that the opioid problem per se is diminishing. It’s just that we have greater availability of the drugs that will keep us alive.” ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content. ___ This story has been corrected to show Ahmad’s first name is Farida, not Farid.

SOLUTION: Number of US overdose deaths appears to be falling.

PROBLEM: The department did studies to identify factors contributing to cancer rates and determine the best approach to prevention and screening. The regions are in Erie, Warren and Suffolk counties and on Staten Island. The meeting schedule is online . Investigators found Warren County had the highest rates of all cancers in the state. Contributing factors were smoking, alcohol consumption, obesity and HPV infection. A meeting is scheduled Nov. 7 at Adirondack Community College in Queensbury. The East Buffalo/Cheektowaga area was found to have elevated numbers of colorectal, kidney, prostate, oral, esophageal and lung cancers. Tobacco was noted as a contributing factor. A meeting is set for Oct. 22 at Buffalo Museum of Science.

SOLUTION: Meetings set to discuss higher cancer rates in 4 NY regions.

PROBLEM: With up to 90 cm of snow and temperatures as low as minus 10.3 Celsius in Scotland, Britain and Ireland issued their most severe red warnings which advise people to stay at home as travel is too dangerous. Dozens of people were trapped in their cars on the M80 motorway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, with several hundred having been standed on the road overnight. Flights and trains were canceled across both Britain and Ireland - with similar transport problems in continental Europe. More freezing snowy weather was forecast as Storm Emma approaches from Portugal and France, with warnings of treacherous weather across southern England and Ireland. Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said people should remain indoors from 1600 GMT on Thursday until the storm, with winds forecast to reach 100 kph (60 mph), has passed. “The risk to life and limb presented by the severe weather conditions should not be underestimated by anyone,” he said following a meeting of the National Emergency Coordination Group. “It is not safe to be outside in such conditions.”  All flights will cease from Dublin airport by 1600 GMT and the two carriers that use the airport, Aer Lingus and Ryanair, said they do not plan to fly from the airport at all on Friday. Trains and planes were canceled across Britain and Ireland. Emergency services also struggled on what many consider to be the first day of the Northern Hemisphere’s Spring. One doctor told Reuters that staff were snowed in at a hospital near Glasgow, and another doctor told the BBC of a surgeon colleague who walked almost three hours in the snow to the town of Paisley to perform a cancer operation. Wholesale gas prices soared to their highest in at least 10 years on Thursday and the British power network regular, the National Grid, warned of a deficit in the market and sought to buy gas from market players to unblock bottlenecks. The cold spell, dubbed the “the Beast from the East”, has been caused by a jump in temperatures high over the Arctic which has weakened the jet stream that brings warm air in from the Atlantic to Ireland and Britain. Britain’s two busiest airports, Heathrow and Gatwick, both said that flights would be canceled. Police in Lincolnshire, eastern England, said that all roads were impassable. Britain’s Met Office warned that freezing rain was likely across southern England as Storm Emma pushes northwards from Portugal and France, adding that it looked set to be the coldest spell in Britain since 1991. In Scotland, there were widespread road closures and no trains running on the two main lines to and from England. Police were rescuing stranding motorists, and found a vulnerable man in what they described as “life threatening weather conditions”. Both Edinburgh and Glasgow airports were closed. Some places in southern Scotland were under such heavy of snow, it affected funeral services in Hawick, near the border with England. “The issue for digging the grave is getting into the burial ground, and we’ve had about 3 feet (90 cm) of snow here,” Ross Walsh of Robson’s Funeral Directors told Reuters. Ireland was bracing for the biggest snow fall since 1982 with public transport halted and schools across the republic closed. The Irish stock market said it would close from midday on Thursday and remain closed all day Friday. In Switzerland, Geneva airport closed for several hours and dozens of flights were canceled. Snow also disrupted road and rail traffic. France had its share of snow too, even on the beaches of the Riviera coast in the southeast. The worst was in the south where hundreds of cars and trucks were stranded on the A9 motorway, a strip that links southern France and Spain. The airport in Montpelier was closed for a period overnight but partially reopened on Thursday. Upwards of 15,000 homes along the Mediterranean were without power on Thursday morning, power network company Enedis said. It also snowed across much of northern Italy overnight, bringing fresh disruption to a rail network already hard hit by heavy snow across the south at the start of the week. Schools in Florence were ordered to shut, while heavy goods vehicles were banned from the roads in the north. In the Netherlands, strong winds caused problems. At Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, only two of the six landing strips could be used on Thursday morning. Authorities had to close sea barriers south of Rotterdam to protect shipping.

SOLUTION:
Siberian blizzards blast Britain and Ireland as Storm Emma approaches.