instruction:
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.
question:
The Baltimore Sun reported that Catherine Pugh continues to convalesce at home and is under doctors’ supervision. She abruptly took leave April 1. “While her well-known tireless energy has been diminished by this illness, her doctors are confident she will recover her health and strength in due course,” Pugh’s personal attorney, Steven Silverman, told The Sun. “I know she is grateful for the good wishes of concern and support that she’s received.” Pugh was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in late March, before she took leave and just as the scandal began to grow. The scandal involves her sales of her “Healthy Holly” children’s books to the University of Maryland Medical System, where she sat on the board. Details also emerged that she had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for her books from entities doing business with the city of Baltimore. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan asked a state prosecutor to begin a criminal investigation. Many city and state lawmakers have called for her resignation. All but one member of the Baltimore City Council have called for Pugh to step down. U.S. Rep. Andy Harris told The Sun that Baltimore needs a new leader. “There are enough questions — legitimate questions cast about this — that I think the mayor probably can no longer be an effective leader of the city,” the Republican said. But the people closest to Pugh say her health, not the scandal, is keeping her from public view. “She’s recovering day by day,” said James Bentley, her spokesman. “She’s focused on getting healthy, and remains committed to Baltimore.” The Sun reported that Pugh, 69, has not publicly faced serious medical issues previously. Neither she nor her advisers have offered details about the nature of her pneumonia. Dr. Paul Auwaerter, clinical director of the division of infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told the newspaper that recovery times can vary. After people seek treatment, and particularly if they’ve been hospitalized, they are on average “feeling better within 48 to 72 hours,” though it “might take five to seven days” to bounce back completely, he said. But he said it can take longer if complicating factors are involved, such as stress. ___ Information from: The Baltimore Sun, http://www.baltimoresun.com
answer:
Advisers: Baltimore’s mayor still recovering from pneumonia.


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With a bumper crop of blacklegged ticks possible this season, researchers in a Lyme disease-plagued part of New York’s Hudson Valley are tackling tick problems across entire neighborhoods with fungal sprays and bait boxes. The $8.8 million, five-year project aims to find out if treating 24 neighborhoods in Dutchess County for ticks, also known as deer ticks, can significantly reduce cases of Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses. “We want to do a better job and actually remove the threat from the neighborhoods, from the places where people are actually exposed to infected ticks,” said Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of New York City. Dutchess County is a patchwork of forests, rolling farmland and thick residential developments that has long been a hotbed of Lyme disease. Tick checks are a common end-of-day routine here, as are inspections for the red, target-shaped rashes associated with tick bites. People spray on tick repellents, treat their clothes with insecticide and even spray their yards. But Ostfeld notes that spraying individual lawns has not proved effective in fighting Lyme disease. So he’s scaling up from one backyard to many. The Tick Project involves more than 900 families in neighborhoods that consist of about 30 to 50 participants. Yards are being treated in the spring and early summer with a fungal spray that kills ticks. Researchers also are deploying bait boxes to attract rodents. An insecticide in the box kills any ticks on mice and chipmunks, two animals largely responsible for infecting ticks with the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Researchers check in with families every two weeks in season to see whether anyone in the house, including cats and dogs, had ticks on them over the period. The Tick Project is funded mostly through a $5 million grant from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, created by the hedge fund manager and his wife. Ostfeld said 2021 is set aside for data analysis, thought they will have some sense of early results within a year. Ostfeld would not divulge which neighborhoods are involved or who is participating, citing the need for privacy and of keeping good relations with participants. Edward Blundell, mayor of the village of Red Hook, mentioned during an interview that he had agreed to take part in the study. While he felt he could take personal steps to protect himself from Lyme disease, he would be satisfied if something comes out of the research. “Let’s let the scientists look at this and give them a mini-lab site here, so we felt our yard could be the mini-site,” Blundell said. Tick researchers say such area-wide studies are complex and difficult to do. They are costly. It can be hard to get all the needed permissions. And variabilities in tick densities over study areas can make the science challenging. Thomas Mather, director of the Tick Encounter Resource Center at the University of Rhode Island, said executing a well-designed study large enough to produce valid results is a “Holy Grail” of tick researchers. Phillip Baker, executive director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation, said the neighborhood approach sounded like a good one but noted that ticks are a resilient parasite. “Ticks have been around for a long, long time,” Baker said, “and there’s no real easy approach to get rid of them.”
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Tick towns: Researchers target neighborhoods in Lyme effort.


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The deal would resolve alleged violations of civil environmental statutes, including the Clean Water Act, related to the pollution from a company factory in Waynesboro. It would amount to the largest environmental damage settlement in Virginia history and the eighth largest in the nation, officials said. The money would go to projects including wildlife habitat restoration, water quality enhancement and improvements to recreational areas. “In bringing this settlement to a close, we are finally righting a wrong that has impacted the South River and the South Fork of the Shenandoah River for so many decades,” Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe said at a news conference announcing the settlement. Wilmington, Delaware-based Dupont Co. used mercury in its process of making synthetic fiber at the plant between 1929 and 1950, according to the state Department of Environmental Quality. Strict storage and disposal regulations weren’t in place at the time, and some of the mercury seeped into the South River and flowed downstream to the South Fork of the Shenandoah River. DuPont discovered the mercury — which accumulates in fish and is especially dangerous to pregnant or breastfeeding women and young children — in the facility’s soil in 1976, officials say. The pollution impacted over 100 miles of river and thousands of acres of floodplain and riparian habitat, affecting fish, mussels, migratory birds and amphibians, the Department of Justice said in a statement. The pollution also has limited some recreational fishing in Waynesboro, a city of about 20,000 in the Shenandoah Valley. The terms of the settlement are outlined in a proposed consent decree that was filed in federal court in Harrisonburg on Thursday. It is subject to a 45-day public comment period and must be approved by the court. The amount of money proposed is “quite impressive,” but mercury is very persistent in the environment and very difficult to remove, said Dr. Thomas Benzing, a professor of integrated science and technology at James Madison University who works with a team of researchers who have been monitoring the mercury levels since 2001. If the settlement goes forward, DuPont would pay slightly more than $42 million toward projects including streamside plantings and erosion control to improve water quality and fish habitat; mussel propagation and restoration; migratory songbird habitat restoration and protection; and recreational fishing access creation or improvement. The company also will pay for renovations at the Front Royal Fish Hatchery to improve production of warm-water fish such as smallmouth bass, at an estimated cost of up to $10 million. “Every dollar is going to be used to clean up the land, the source issues and the water, to where it would have been” if not for the pollution, said Assistant Attorney General John Cruden of the Justice Department’s Environmental and Natural Resources Division. No one from DuPont — which is awaiting final regulatory approval for its merger with Dow Chemical in a deal to create DowDuPont, a $130 billion conglomerate — spoke at the announcement. But Mike Liberati, South River project director for the DuPont Corporate Remediation Group, said in a statement that DuPont “is committed to a long-term presence in the Waynesboro area and to maintaining transparency with its citizens.” The first phase of remediation, involving part of the riverbank in Waynesboro’s Constitution Park could be complete in February. Soil there containing the highest concentrations of mercury is being excavated and hauled away and replaced by clean topsoil, Liberati said. “It’s going to be a long-term project. It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight,” Benzing said.
answer:

DuPont to pay $50M over mercury-contaminated Virginia rivers.