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: A Lehigh County judge tossed out evidence cited in support of drug and firearms counts stemming from the Nov. 7 search in Allentown, The (Allentown) Morning Call reported . “The smell of marijuana is no longer per se indicative of a crime,” Judge Maria Dantos wrote in her opinion filed earlier this month. Authorities said Timothy Barr, 27, was a passenger in the car driven by his wife that was stopped by state troopers on a traffic violation. Troopers said they smelled a strong odor of marijuana and told Barr that gave them the legal right to search the vehicle even after he showed them his card authorizing the use of medical marijuana. Officers found small amounts of marijuana and residue and also found a loaded handgun under the driver’s seat. Court records indicate that Barr cannot legally possess a firearm due to a prior conviction. In her ruling, Dantos said it was “illogical, impractical and unreasonable” for the troopers to suspect illegal activity once Barr showed them his medical marijuana card. She said Pennsylvania lawmakers never contemplated people with such cards being arrested and prosecuted for possession of marijuana in a package not clearly marked with a dispensary name. “Such actions are merely means of hampering the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes,” Dantos wrote. Prosecutors must now decide whether to appeal to state Superior Court or try to move forward without the evidence. District Attorney Jim Martin said his office is reviewing the opinion and transcripts from a July 17 hearing and had made no decision on an appeal. Defense attorney Joshua Karoly said the ruling could be the first step in changing a procedural rule that allows police to search a vehicle based on the smell of drugs alone. “This case will put a spotlight on the plain smell doctrine in Pennsylvania which police use far too often to invade citizens’ privacy,” he said. Dantos wrote in the opinion that officers’ confusion over medical marijuana exemplified a “clear disconnect between the medical community and the law enforcement community.” One trooper testified that he believed medical marijuana had no smell and the other said she mistakenly thought dried marijuana was illegal and not used for medical purposes. Marijuana in flower and dry leaf form has been offered at dispensaries since August 2018. ___ This story has been corrected to show that the medical marijuana card belonged to the passenger, not the driver, and decision came earlier this month rather than Friday. ___ Information from: The Morning Call, http://www.mcall.com Claim: Vehicle search prompted by marijuana smell ruled illegal.

Answer: An eastern Pennsylvania judge has ruled that state police troopers who said they smelled marijuana in a car weren’t allowed to search it once they were shown a passenger’s medical marijuana card.


Question: Paragraph: The release does not mention cost. The FDA evaluates drugs without consideration of cost, so it’s understandable that they wouldn’t comment on it — and that’s why we’re rating this Not Applicable. But let’s be real here: The value of a new drug is a function not just of how well it works, but its cost-effectiveness. So we look forward to the day when any news release about a new drug — even one from the FDA — will include some mention of cost in its message. This release gives the preliminary results from a single study of 310 patients. Because the drug is experimental, long-term results haven’t been studied. Of the 310 patients enrolled in the lone trial upon which the approval is based, 14.8 percent showed some shrinkage of tumors during the assessment period lasting from 2.1 to about 13.8 months. For a subset of patients who were classified as having a positive response to PD-L1 expression, the response was 26 percent. As noted above, tumor shrinkage doesn’t always lead to improvements in survival or quality of life. It is a surrogate endpoint — a substitute — for the main outcome which is survival. Although this drug looks promising, to be fully transparent about its benefits as currently known, the release should have explained this. As noted in the “Summary,” another larger study is underway to assess the drug’s impact on extending life and improving quality of life. The release includes a description of side effects of this treatment. The most common ones included fatigue, decreased appetite, nausea, urinary tract infection, fever (pyrexia) and constipation. The release also mentions that patients taking the drug have an increased risk of infection and serious side effects that are “immune-mediated.” We would have liked a bit more context on what this term means for patients. The release outlines that this is the very first clinical trial of this compound for safety and efficacy, and under which regulatory paths the drug was assessed, including “breakthrough therapy designation, priority review status and accelerated approval.” We’re giving this release the benefit of the doubt and rating it Satisfactory for its bare bones description of the trial (and since we already addressed the lack of long-term survival data in the “Benefits” section.) As it stands, the results from the small trial were preliminary and short-term and did not reflect long-term survival. We would have liked to see a reference or link to the completed trial where one could look at the results to assess independently or learn more about the outcomes. We think the release should have provided more data on the patient demographics, the treatment regimen (dosing amount and schedule) as well as the range in tumor reduction. There is no disease mongering. This release describes the approval of a new drug by a regulatory agency, but we’d still like to know who sponsored the study that’s the basis for the approval. It’s not enough to state who markets the drug. The release does not give us very much information about alternatives. These patients had already received other therapy and their cancer had recurred, so it is implied that they had no other alternatives. But this isn’t stated very clearly. We can assume (and it seems evident) that the platinum-based therapy that the patients didn’t respond to initially is the usual treatment. The FDA’s approval of a drug clears the way for the drug sponsor to scale up production and begin marketing and selling the product. (The FDA doesn’t state this explicitly but it can be inferred.) A NYT article said the drug would be available in about two months. The release clearly states this product is first of its kind for this type of cancer. We found no unjustifiable language. Claim: FDA approves new, targeted treatment for bladder cancer

Answer: The Food and Drug Administration approved a new immunotherapy drug that acts as a “checkpoint” inhibitor in patients whose bladder cancer (urothelial carcinoma) has not responded to other chemotherapy. The drug, atezolizumab (marketed as Tecentriq), showed effectiveness in about 14 percent of 310 patients in a very preliminary study. The release notes that the trial measured tumor shrinkage as the main outcome. It didn’t note, as a NYT article did, and important for this type of trial, that it is unknown whether the treatment makes a difference in survival. A larger study is being done to examine this. Whether it makes a difference in quality of life is also important and will presumably be examined in the larger trial. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates 76,960 new cases of bladder cancer and 16,390 deaths from this disease in 2016. This approval of a new drug for treating bladder cancer is part of a wider area of research into immunotherapy, in which drugs target mechanisms of the human immune response. Patients with the PD-L1 protein highly expressed in their tumors appear to be responding best to the drug. This drug is an example of targeted chemotherapy which is becoming more important as treatments can be fine-tuned to the cancers of individual patients. In patients with intractable cancers, immunotherapy appears to offer some new hope while also bringing sobering questions about affordability and disparity of access by income. The drugs are typically very expensive — with some estimates putting the treatment cost for a single patient as high as $1 million. When the FDA gives a compound a “breakthrough” designation, some physicians and patients can misunderstand what that means. That’s a topic recently explored in this post.


Question: Paragraph: About 1.3 million people worldwide died of TB in 2017. A further 300,000 people with both HIV and TB died in last year, according to World Health Organization figures released this month. Once referred to as ‘consumption’ because of the way sufferers appear to waste away, tuberculosis has been known for centuries. The bacterium responsible for TB was discovered 136 years ago and the development of an effective antibiotic helped rich countries to largely contain the disease after World War II. Still, the U.N. health agency estimates that about 10 million people worldwide become newly infected with TB each year, mostly in poor countries where access to health care is limited. “It really is a global epidemic,” said Dr. Tereza Kasaeva, who heads WHO’s program to combat TB. Speaking ahead of a high-level meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Kasaeva said the U.N.’s target of eradicating tuberculosis worldwide by 2030 “is very ambitious given that for now progress is too slow.” Like HIV, tuberculosis remains a highly stigmatized illness, preventing some sufferers from seeking treatment. Experts are particularly concerned about the rising number of people contracting drug-resistant variants of TB, many of which aren’t diagnosed properly. Treating them can be costly and arduous, requiring years of medication with strong side effects. Dr. Ralf Otto-Knapp of the German Central Committee to Combat Tuberculosis, a group established in the late 19th century when the disease was still widespread in much of Europe, warned against complacency about the disease in an age of global travel. “Because of the increasing mobility in society it also affects economically more powerful countries,” he said. “We need a joint political will and the necessary resources to fight tuberculosis effectively.” Kasaeva said she hoped leaders attending the New York meeting Wednesday will commit to closing the growing gap between the amount of money available and the billions more required to tackle the disease. Campaigners applauded a recent decision by the World Health Organization to recommend a change in the way drug-resistant tuberculosis is treated, prioritizing oral drugs over injectable medication. The group Doctors Without Borders said such treatment can reduce debilitating side effects, help improve cure rates and cut the number of deaths, but noted that it requires U.S. pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, which makes the key drug bedaquiline, to reduce its price in low- and middle-income countries with high rates of drug-resistant TB. The company has already sharply reduced costs for the drug in some countries, but in others a six-month course of treatment can cost several thousand dollars — far more than most people can afford. Companies have been reluctant to invest in developing TB medication — with only two new drugs coming onto the market in the past 50 years. Claim: Governments to discuss tackling tuberculosis at UN summit.

Answer:
Governments from around the world will gather Wednesday to discuss the persistent scourge of tuberculosis, which last year claimed more lives than any other communicable disease.