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.
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Question: Most cases are reported in the northern and eastern panhandles probably because of their proximity to the high-incidence states of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, the Department of Health and Human Resources said. In an advisory Monday to health care providers, Health Commissioner Dr. Rahul Gupta wrote that the increase could be from increased reporting or from more ticks infected with the bacteria. Most cases appear between May and September, but ticks have become more active in winter months, he said. According to the department, 580 cases have been reported so far this year, up from 97 statewide in 2012. “Based on the change, West Virginia is considered a high incidence Lyme disease state,” Gupta wrote. Patients treated early with antibiotics usually recover quickly. He recommended a two-step blood test to confirm evidence of antibodies against the Lyme disease bacteria. Symptoms often include a circular rash around a tick bite and fever, headaches and fatigue, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. If left untreated, the infection can spread to joints, the heart and the nervous system. The CDC says there were more than 36,000 probable cases in the U.S. last year, with 26,203 confirmed.

Answer: West Virginia reports increasing Lyme disease cases.


Question: "There’s a new sheriff in charge of the U.S. Senate, and he’s eager to show how he’s shaking up the law of the land. We’re talking, of course, about new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who took over the Senate’s top slot after the midterm elections bounced Democrats from power. And in this new world, Republicans are touting an eye-catching factoid as evidence of a functional Senate, one they say runs on fairness and order under GOP control. ""Amazing fact: Senate has already voted on more amendments in 2015 than Reid allowed ALL YEAR last year,"" tweeted Phil Kerpen, opinion-writer and president of conservative 501(c)(4) American Commitment, on Jan. 22, 2015. Kerpen, formerly of Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth and the libertarian Cato Institute, told us he heard the statistic from McConnell himself. We wanted to know if it was true that the Senate has already allowed more votes on amendments in less than one month than all of 2014. And why? On Senate stoppage and filled ‘trees’ The simple answer on the number of votes is that Kerpen is correct. But the reason behind it varies depending on your particular political lens. A simple search of Senate roll call votes on amendments in 2014 and 2015 backs up Kerpen’s statement. In 2014, there were 15 roll call votes on amendments. As of Jan. 22, 2015, the date of Kerpen's tweet, there were 16 roll call votes on amendments. There have since been 17 more votes on amendments to the bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which passed a week later but will likely face President Barack Obama’s veto pen. Kerpen came at the tally a different way, counting ""real"" votes on amendments, a distinction that also includes roll call votes on motions to table amendments, which effectively kills them. By his math, there were 16 votes allowed on amendments in 2014 and 26 so far in 2015. By either count, the numbers work. What changed? In 2014, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., relied on a funny-sounding procedure called ""filling the amendment tree."" Basically, Reid filled the docket allowed for amendments by adding amendments with inconsequential changes that no one else could override. The procedural tactic prevented Republican-sponsored amendments from being heard on the floor. ""He did that more than any of his predecessors,"" Donald Ritchie, Senate historian, told PunditFact. Reid wasn’t doing this just to be a not-so-nice guy. To Democrats, it was to counter Republican tactics. Unlike the House, the Senate does not have strict rules for the substance of amendments that can be attached to bills (i.e., you could add a health care amendment onto a defense spending bill). And that’s exactly what happened in years past. Republicans began introducing off-topic amendments that, for example, cut off U.S. aid to Egypt or, a favorite of Sen. David Vitter, R-La., to eliminate health care subsidies for Senate staffers. No matter what the topic of the bill. Sometimes this was in effort to force difficult votes for Democrats back home. To Republicans, Reid’s style of blocking amendments emulated an uncooperative and off-the-rails leadership style -- one that is tremendously well-documented -- that stymied policymaking. To Democrats, it was necessary to get anything accomplished. Republicans were filibustering votes on the underlying bills and not committing to a vote in exchange for allowing some amendments, said Steven S. Smith, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis. ""Reid saw they were filibustering everything, bringing the place to a standstill,"" Smith told us. ""So he wondered why he should give them votes at all."" Reid’s office does not dispute the number of votes on amendments, but they do take issue with what they deem an ""empty talking point"" that neglects Republican responsibility for the gridlock. His spokesman argues that Republicans blocked their own share of amendments by not compromising on potential amendments to be heard on the floor and refusing to come to an agreement about when a bill should come to a vote. ""(Reid) makes no apologies for blocking what we all consider to be extremely pointless political amendments that were just designed not to improve the bills we were working on but to run 30-second political ads against Democratic senators,"" said spokesman Adam Jentleson. ""Republicans are entirely culpable in that number being what it is."" Reid’s style of blocking amendments irritated Republicans, sure, but it also flared up during the 2014 midterms with Republicans using it to attack Democrats. The GOP pounced on Alaska Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Begich, for instance, for his lack of roll-call votes on his amendments. McConnell, conversely, said he would allow open amendments on the Keystone XL bill, hence the GOP celebrating its ""new management"" style. As political experts told us to expect, there have already been clashes with McConnell’s methods a few days after the initial celebration. During the Keystone debate, Democrats objected to McConnell tabling Democratic amendments and not letting Democrats debate their amendments for a minute. Reid, perhaps ironically, tweeted, ""I've never seen debate shut down as aggressively as when Sen. McConnell refused to allow Dems to debate their own amendments for just 1 min. ... and that’s saying something."" What the experts tell us Bottom line, experts said, voters shouldn’t take the new tactics as evidence that McConnell’s ""return to normal order"" will give the Democrats an easy path to voting on the amendments of their choice. ""It’s not going to happen,"" said Roy Meyers, University of Maryland, Baltimore County affiliate professor of public policy. University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis agreed, saying, ""The overall idea isn’t trivial (‘regular order’), but the exact number isn’t very significant, especially if McConnell, as expected, runs the Senate almost completely to the (Republicans’) advantage."" It’s too early to know whether we have a ""sea change"" of order on our hands in the Senate, said Sarah Binder, George Washington University political science professor. ""In other words, the intense partisanship of the Senate that led Sen. Reid to all-but shut down the amendment process last year has not dissipated,"" Binder said. ""I think the question going forward is whether McConnell can find a way to conduct the Senate such that senators from both parties believe their legislative needs are being met."" Our ruling Kerpen, among others, tweeted, ""Amazing fact: Senate has already voted on more amendments in 2015 than (Harry) Reid allowed ALL YEAR last year."" On the numbers, that is right. But experts cautioned us that the claim falls more in the interesting factoid category than a sign of a different or more cooperative Senate leadership. The statement is accurate but needs clarification and additional information. That meets our definition of . Correction: An earlier version of this fact-check incorrectly described Sen. David Vitter's amendment."

Answer: Amazing fact: Senate has already voted on more amendments in 2015 than Reid allowed ALL YEAR last year.


Question: A pharmacist in a file photo. The issue of prescription drug abuse shot to prominence with January's death of 28-year-old Hollywood actor Heath Ledger after he took six different prescriptions. REUTERS/File But that’s where her trouble with addiction began. By age 14, the teen from an upper middle-class Philadelphia suburb led a dangerous double life. Editor of her school paper, strong student and popular athlete, Roisman was also hooked on painkillers and other drugs in an addiction that illustrates the rapid expansion in prescription drug abuse in America. “My friends and I would take a bunch of different pills and break them up and put them all together and call it confetti. It could be any combination of anything. We could learn from it, and continue to take it,” said Roisman, who is now 17. The issue of prescription drug abuse shot to prominence with January’s death of 28-year-old Hollywood actor Heath Ledger after he took six different prescriptions. The death of Ledger, who plays the Joker in the new Batman film “The Dark Night,” adds to a growing list of prescription drug overdoses that includes Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith in 2007. Other deaths are less celebrated. In the 45-54 age group, overdose deaths fueled by prescription drugs now surpass motor vehicle deaths as the nation’s No. 1 cause of accidental death, federal data show. The federal data also show nearly 7 million Americans abused prescription drugs in 2007 — more than cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, Ecstasy and inhalants such as marijuana combined. The figure is up 80 percent since 2000. Definitions of abuse vary but refer typically to nonmedical use of prescription drugs. The number of Americans treated for abuse of painkillers surged 321 percent from 1995 to 2005, federal statistics show — a trend some health experts link to another stunning figure: the 180 million prescriptions dispensed legally by U.S. pharmacies each year for pain medication. In Florida, whose reputation for cocaine and other hard drugs was burnished in movies such as “Scarface” and “Miami Vice,” the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of death caused by all illicit drugs combined, according to an analysis of 2007 autopsies by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission released in June. “What you have among over the counter and prescription drug use is a very low perception of risk,” said Stephen Pasierb, president and chief executive of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a nonprofit advocacy group. “There’s very low social disapproval. In fact, there are parents who almost relieved that their kid is using Vicodin and not smoking marijuana,” he said. Len Paulozzi, an epidemiologist with the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, testified recently in Congress that he believed physicians were improperly trained in the long-term dangers of therapy involving opioid painkillers, or drugs containing opium. “There are guidelines out there, but we don’t think that they’re being routinely followed,” he said. Sen. Joseph Biden, a Democrat from Delaware, proposed to make August 2008 “National Medicine Abuse Awareness Month” in a resolution now before the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying the Internet had become “an information superhighway” for abuse of medicine in the United States. But containing the abuse is notoriously difficult. Thirty-eight states have passed legislation for prescription drug monitoring programs to trace the source of drugs, and police in some states have had success in reducing pharmacy break-ins. A University of Maine program provides pre-addressed, postage-paid pouches to the elderly so they can mail their surplus prescription drugs to state authorities for disposal in a bid to reduce the amount that get into the wrong hands. None of the measures has stopped the growth nationwide, and experts point to several stubborn problems, including the phenomenon of “doctor shopping,” in which patients go to multiple doctors to get several prescriptions. Hundreds of online pharmacies also offer drugs that include generic versions of opiates like Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin, methadone and Abbott Laboratories Inc’s Vicodin, which are legitimately prescribed as painkillers, along with stimulants like Ritalin made by Novartis, and benzodiazepines like Pfizer’s Xanax. It is as easy in the United States to buy opiates or other abusable prescription drugs online as it is to purchase a book, said David Festinger, a scientist who has studied online drug sales at the Treatment Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Regulating such trade is tough, he said. “These Internet enterprises set up a bank account in one country, buy their drugs from another country, and do their merchandising and sales from another country,” he said. “Everything is spread all over the globe. And in an instant, if anybody’s on their tail, they can switch everything around.”   For many children, getting the drugs is simple. In Philadelphia, Roisman and her friends raided family medicine cabinets for the big prizes — OxyContin, a kind of synthetic morphine also known as “hillbilly heroin,” along with Ritalin and Vicodin — until she eventually passed out one day in school. A drug test showed she had seven drugs in her system. “People think that it’s OK because it’s a prescribed pill. It comes from a credible source. Even if a doctor has not told you it’s OK, they’ve told someone else it’s OK,” said Roisman, who became sober two years ago after treatment at a rehab center run by the nonprofit Caron organization. She blames doctors for failing to “watch what they are prescribing” and parents for failing to understand “just how hard people will work to get what they want when they are an addict,” adding many teens use the drugs to help study. On college campuses, popping Adderall, Ritalin and other prescribed amphetamine-like psychostimulant drugs is a popular way to help cram for tests and cope with academic pressure. Some are legitimately prescribed for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, helping sufferers increase alertness, attention and energy. But many use it without prescriptions. Almost 60 percent of students have been offered an opportunity to try prescription stimulants by their junior (third) year of college in the United States, said Amelia Arria, a senior researcher at the University of Maryland’s Center for Drug Abuse Research, which surveyed 1,253 students on drug usage. Health insurers are also feeling the effects. Some face mounting pressure to expand coverage to include substance-abuse disorders. Others are grappling with swindlers who obtain illicit prescription narcotics through fraudulent insurance claims for bogus prescriptions, treating phantom injuries. Such fraud costs health insurers up to $72.5 billion (36.6 billion pounds) a year, according to a 2008 report by the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, an advocacy group based in Washington.

Answer:
U.S grapples with rising prescription drug addiction.