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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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Paragraph: Frates is fighting back from a summer health scare that landed him in the hospital while still trying to be a public face of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a degenerative disease that destroys nerve cells, impairs physical functions and so far has no cure. The former Boston College baseball star, who can no longer speak or move, spent most of July in the hospital battling pneumonia and other infections. In July, a tweet erroneously reporting his demise led to worldwide headlines. Frates wryly countered by posting a short video of himself lying in a hospital bed with Pearl Jam’s “Alive” playing in the background. Using a computer system that lets him type out words through eye movements, Frates has been tweeting about his progress to his nearly 30,000 followers, along with regular musings about his family and friends, living with ALS and Boston sports. “lots of down days as you can imagine with als, sometimes you don’t feel human,” he tweeted Sept. 23. “Today I am definitely feeling sorry for myself, sukxx. but I will bounce back. Eff! you als.. Friggin a hole! !” In the weeks since his July health scare, the 32-year-old has re-emerged to accept honors and accolades across his home state of Massachusetts. Last month, he joined Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, Red Sox officials and the Boston College baseball team on the steps of City Hall to declare Sept. 5 “Pete Frates Day” in Boston. And former Red Sox slugger David Ortiz and other Boston sports legends feted Frates at Fenway Park to mark the release of a new book on his life, “The Ice Bucket Challenge: Pete Frates and the Fight Against ALS.” Half the proceeds benefit Frates and his family. Frates’ wife, Julie, said it’s been a difficult and busy few months, but she couldn’t persuade her husband to slow things down even if she wanted to. “He’s the one pushing to be out there,” she said. “We take all the lead from him.” The ice bucket challenge had been around for almost a year to benefit various causes. But Frates is credited with helping focus it on ALS specifically and taking it global using his wide network of supporters as an established ALS advocate. The challenge raised roughly $220 million in 2014, of which $115 million went to the ALS Association. A sequel campaign the next summer raised just over $1 million, according to the association. The ALS Association says it has committed more than $89 million of the 2014 windfall to research. “New, exciting research is just starting to pan out, and that’s drawing new talent to ALS research, and a lot of companies are now interested in ALS,” said Dr. Nazem Atassi, a Massachusetts General Hospital neurologist whose ALS research benefited from ice bucket challenge money. “It’s the perfect environment for drug discovery.” Among the most promising developments to come out of research funded by the challenge has been the identification of at least four genes that contribute to the disease, a critical step toward developing new treatments, said Kevin Eggan, a professor at Harvard University who specializes in ALS. Another development that gives the Frates family hope is Radicava, a drug approved in May by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration following testimony from the Frates and other advocates. It’s the first new treatment approved specifically for ALS in 22 years. Frates’ mother, Nancy, said they’re applying to get her son on the drug, even though it’s not clear how it might help, given his advanced condition. The medication, which was developed in Japan without funding from the ice bucket challenge, has been shown to slow the disease in recently diagnosed patients. “You just want it to stop,” Nancy said. “You want someone to say this disease is not tearing through your loved one’s body anymore.” ALS is still finding new ways to attack Frates, said his father, John, a city councilor in Beverly who quit his financial services job to help care for his son after he was diagnosed in 2012. Frates’ bladder stopped working last year, requiring his urine now to be drained with a catheter every three hours, John Frates said. “It’s amazing he’s tolerating all of it. It just shows the courage, will and determination he has to be with us,” Frates’ father said. “He’s as incapacitated as a human being can be. That’s his quality of life.” ___ Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo. His work can be found at https://www.apnews.com/search/philip%20marcelo Claim: ALS patient behind ice bucket challenge: I will bounce back.
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Pete Frates was mistakenly written off as dead this summer. Turns out, the man who helped spark the ice bucket challenge that raised millions of dollars for research on Lou Gehrig’s disease hasn’t gone anywhere yet.


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


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Paragraph: Ahead of an anticipated shortage of medical supplies, hospital staff met in a conference room south of Seattle to make homemade masks for the doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals on the frontline of tackling the coronavirus outbreak. “We’re days away from running out of the equipment we need,” said Melissa Tizon, Associate Vice President of Providence St. Joseph Health, which runs 51 hospitals across five western states. “We’re expecting more shipments later on but until then we’ve got to improvise.”  With coronavirus cases surging past 13,000 in the United State, health care workers are dealing with not only a shortage of masks but also surgical gowns and protective eye gear. President Donald Trump, speaking about medical gear at a White House briefing on Thursday, said “millions of masks” were in production, but did not give details. “We have helped out, and there are right now millions of masks being made. But this is really for the local governments, governors and people within the state, depending on the way they divided it up. And they’ll do that, and they’re doing a very good job of it.”  When asked by a reporter at the briefing why the increased production of masks was not reaching hospitals, Trump said the medical system was “obsolete” and the production system “wasn’t meant for this” emergency. “Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion,” Trump said. “Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.”  Vice President Mike Pence said at the same briefing, “We’ve vastly increased the supply of medical masks, and we’re going to continue to put a priority on making sure that we’re calling on industry at every level.”  Meanwhile, many hospitals in other states have issued emergency calls for private companies to donate face masks and other items that can be used as medical protective gear. The Illinois Health and Hospital Association on Thursday, made that plea to help the state’s 200 hospitals, asking for donations of masks from construction companies, dentists, veterinarians and any other group that might have the masks, called N95s. “Hospitals all over the state are in jeopardy of potentially running out of critically needed protective medical supplies,” said the associations president and chief executive officer A.J. Wilhelmi. Claim: Faced with a shortage of face masks, some U.S. doctors make their own.
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Doctors in Seattle have been reduced to making their own face masks out of sheets of plastic, after a global shortage of medical protective gear has hit Washington state, an epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.