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: Repeated attacks on treatment centers by armed militiamen and community members who think Ebola is a conspiracy against them have hampered the response to the second-deadliest outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever in history. In the latest attack, on a hospital in the city of Butembo, a senior World Health Organization (WHO) epidemiologist from Cameroon was killed and two others wounded last Friday. At a protest on Wednesday in Butembo, the biggest city to be affected by the current outbreak, dozens of Congolese doctors and nurses marched behind a banner reading “Ebola exists” and urged authorities to take additional security measures. “If our security is not guaranteed, we will go on strike from the first week of May,” Dr. Kalima Nzanzu said, reading from a memo to Butembo’s mayor, Sylvain Kanyamanda. Kanyamanda told Reuters that he understood the health workers’ frustrations and that the government was determined to respond to their demands. The latest outbreak of Ebola, which was declared last August and is Congo’s tenth since the virus was discovered in 1976, is believed to have killed 880 people and infected nearly 500 more in North Kivu and Ituri provinces. The military prosecutor’s office in North Kivu said on Wednesday that authorities had captured the suspected ringleader of last week’s attack, as well as about a dozen other suspects. Prosecutors believe the assailants belong to an armed group called the Patriotic Union for the Liberation of Congo (UPLC) based on a tract left at the hospital threatening health workers. Dozens of militia are active in eastern Congo’s borderlands with Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, where they run lucrative rackets and fight over land, ethnicity and mineral resources. Claim: Ebola first responders threaten strike if security not improved.

SOLUTION: Health workers in one of the epicenters of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola outbreak threatened on Wednesday to go on strike as early as next week if authorities don’t do more to protect them.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: In May 2020, a photograph started to circulate on social media supposedly showing a petri dish that was coughed on by a person not wearing a mask and a petri dish coughed on by the same person wearing a mask:  As the Twitter user noted, this image reportedly was taken by lab technician Katie Corley and shared to her public Facebook page. Corley’s original post was shared on May 6 along with a message to the “conspiracy theorists” who were refusing to wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic: Visual experiment for you conspiracy theorists: I coughed on two petri dishes, one while wearing a mask and one not. Shocking! The one on the left with no growth is the one I used a mask for! The one on the right where I didn’t wear a mask is full of bacteria. So yeah, maybe cloth masks don’t give you much protection, but they protect the people around you. Maybe wear one if you insist it’s your constitutional right to eat at Chili’s. We note that many social media users who encountered this photograph made some incorrect assumptions about what it showed. For example, many people seemed to think that the petri dish on the right showed SARS-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus at the center of the current pandemic, and that this photograph demonstrated just how effective masks were at stopping the spread of COVID-19. This photograph, however, simply shows “normal oral flora.”   In an edit to her post, Corley explained that the petri dish on the right contained “normal oral flora,” such as staph species, neisseria species, and corynebacterium. Corley also noted that viruses are much smaller than the bacterium shown in the petri dish, but noted that this small experiment demonstrated how masks can lessen droplet spread that can carry viruses. Corley added: There’s been a lot of questions regarding this experiment, so here’s some answers: 1. I used a cloth mask I made myself with disposable lab coat material. 2. I used blood agar. 3. The plate on the right looks “old” or “stale” because of the growth. Some of the organisms on this plate are alpha hemolytic, meaning they partially hemolyze blood. The agar itself is made with 5% sheep’s blood, so when it’s partially hemolyzed, it turns a dark green color. 4. As for the growth, it’s mostly viridans strep, staph species (not staph aureus), neisseria species, and corynebacterium. Pretty normal oral flora. 5. I realize that viruses are 1,000 times smaller than bacteria. The point of the masks is to prevent droplet spread, which carry bacteria as well as viruses. Corley, of course, was not the first person to notice how face masks lessened droplet transmission. Similar images showing bacteria from a person’s cough growing in a petri dish can also be seen in this article from the Microbiology Society. Rich Davis, the Clinical Microbiology Lab Directory at Providence Sacred Heart, posted a series of images of a similar demonstration: What does a mask do? Blocks respiratory droplets coming from your mouth and throat. Two simple demos: First, I sneezed, sang, talked & coughed toward an agar culture plate with or without a mask. Bacteria colonies show where droplets landed. A mask blocks virtually all of them. pic.twitter.com/ETUD9DFmgU — Rich Davis, PhD, D(ABMM), MLS 🦠🔬🧫 (@richdavisphd) June 26, 2020  Davis, like Corley, emphasized that this was not an experiment showing the efficacy of masks against the spread of COVID-19. Rather, it was a simple demonstration to show how masks lessened the spread of respiratory droplets, which can carry the disease. The British children’s television show “Operation Ouch!” also took a look at how much bacteria gets disseminated when a person coughs. While that episode did not include masks, it did compare a petri dish that was coughed on by a man with no mouth covering and a petri dish that was coughed on by a man who covered his mouth with an elbow. Here’s how the petri dish looked after it was coughed on by the man who covered his mouth (left) and the petri dish coughed on by the man who didn’t (right). As you can see, the results from “Operation Ouch!” are very similar to the results seen in Corley’s post:  Here’s the clip from “Operation Ouch!” (The cough experiment starts around the 50-second mark): A 2005 study published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology noted that more than 700 bacterial species have been detected in the oral cavity. Covering your mouth when you cough (either with an elbow or a mask) can reduce droplet transmission and lessen the spread of potentially harmful germs. Professor Lindsay Grayson, director of infectious diseases at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital, said as much during a presentation at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco in 2009 concerning research on the effectiveness of masks in slowing the spread of influenza. The New York Times reported: “If you’re wearing a mask to prevent yourself from catching it, they’re not so effective,” said Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne and one of the study’s co-authors. “But if you’re sick with the flu and coughing and sputtering, those masks do prevent you from spraying those bugs everywhere.” The researchers asked nine study subjects with documented cases of influenza type A or B to test two different types of masks — the standard, disposable surgical masks and a more costly, respirator-style mask. The flu patients coughed into a petri dish while wearing both types of mask as well as without the mask. The dish was then tested for the presence of flu virus. When either type of mask was worn, no virus was detected on the petri dish. But how effective are masks in preventing the spread of COVID-19? While the exact efficacy of masks on the spread of COVID-19 is still undetermined, health officials do recommend that people wear masks in public because these face coverings can prevent droplet transmission. Claim: A photograph shows one petri dish that was coughed on by a person not wearing a mask and another petri dish coughed on by the same person wearing a mask. 

SOLUTION: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told us:

PROBLEM: Paragraph: A booming dairy farming industry, along with a surge in tourists seeking unspoiled natural attractions, has taken its toll on the country’s environment, heavily marketed as ‘100% Pure’. Particularly affected is its vast network of once pristine rivers and lakes, which are now some of the most polluted among OECD countries, according to some experts. About 60 percent of them are unfit for swimming, the Environment Ministry said in a report in 2014. Experts say water quality has deteriorated further since. In a Colmar Brunton survey conducted last month, 82 percent of respondents said they were “extremely or very” concerned about the pollution of rivers and lakes, more than any other issue including living costs, child poverty and climate change. “(New Zealanders) are extremely worried that they are losing their ability to swim, fish and gather food from their rivers, lakes and streams,” said Martin Taylor, the chief executive of Fish & Game New Zealand, a non-government agency that commissioned the survey. “People see those activities as their birthright, but over the last 20 years, that right is being lost because the level of pollution in waterways has increased as farming intensifies.”  With an election coming next year, political experts say water pollution could be a key issue for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Ardern led a coalition to power in 2017 promising social reforms and laws to protect the environment, but business confidence has suffered under her government. More than 13,000 people signed a #toomanycows Greenpeace campaign on Twitter launched last week calling for a ban on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. “New Zealand already has way too many cows, and synthetic nitrogen is the key driver of the dairy intensification and expansion that leads to the dangerous double whammy of harm to rivers and climate,” said Nick Young from Greenpeace. New Zealand has nearly five million cows, more than its human population of about 4.7 million. Popular swimming holes near the famed Mt Taranaki in the west of New Zealand’s North Island were shut this month due to high E.coli bacteria, an indicator of faecal contamination. Tests are underway to determine the cause, but effluent from nearby dairy farms has been blamed in the past for contaminating these waters. DairyNZ Chief Executive Tim Mackle says dairy farmers have been doing their bit, with 97 percent of waterways on dairy farms fenced off from cows, and significant work done to establish riparian margins and wetlands. “The reality is that all types of land use contribute to water quality – and that farming, whether it’s vegetables, fruit, beef, sheep, dairy, deer or even wine – must all work together to make sure waterways are protected,” Mackle said in a statement. “The most polluted rivers actually run through urban centers, and this is where the public can do their bit too.”   Only about 15 percent of New Zealand’s streams run through dairy farms, he added. Dairy and tourism directly contribute about 3.5 percent and 6.1 percent respectively to New Zealand’s $200 billion GDP. Both industries rely on the country’s clean, green image with cascading rivers, unspoiled forests and lush pastures that made it the ideal backdrop for the popular Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movie series. The sparsely populated country is spread over a mountainous area about the size of United Kingdom or California, more than a quarter of which is set aside for reserves and national parks. Hoards of tourists are expected to arrive in the country next month during the Chinese New Year, a peak travel season, which residents feel will take a further toll on the natural environment. Chinese are the second largest source of tourists to New Zealand after neighboring Australia, according to 2018 data. Apart from polluting the water, residents also fear mass tourism and freedom campers may destroy the country’s iconic landscape, as seen in places like Venice, Boracay and Bali. Overcrowding in Venice forced the local administration to restrict access to tourists while Boracay was shut down last year, after mass tourism turned the famed Philippines island into a “cesspool”. Richard Davies, tourism policy manager at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, said the increase in the number of campers has caused problems in some areas, waste being one of them. “We have a collective duty to care for our environment and for New Zealand, and there have been a number of initiatives to help educate local and international campers on how to camp responsibility, and funding for infrastructure to help local bodies to address the issues that can arise,” he said. Mike Joy, a senior researcher at Victoria University of Wellington’s Institute for Governance and Policy Studies says the environment is paying the price for hands-off governance and  the intensification of dairy and tourism industries. “It’s an own goal…they are shooting themselves in the foot. The biggest value add this country can have is its clean, green image and they are just ruining that image,” Joy said. The government has said it is committed to improving water quality. In 2017 it set a national target of making 90 percent of New Zealand’s large rivers and lakes swimmable by 2040, with an interim target of 80 percent swimmable by 2030. Joy, who is a member of some government working groups, said change will only happen if governments take on the powerful dairy and tourism industries. “Right now, a lot more money is spent on spin and propaganda but there’s been very little change.” Claim: 100% Pure? New Zealand's deteriorating water raises a stink.

SOLUTION:
New Zealand’s clean, green image took a beating this summer as tourists traveling through the countryside posted pictures of lakes and rivers off limits due to contamination by farm effluent, garbage and human faeces.