TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: A still image provided by KPIX TV and taken from the broadcaster's video footage shows Timothy Ray Brown during an interview at his home in San Francisco. Timothy Ray Brown, was a young HIV-positive American living and working in Berlin who had developed leukaemia and suffered a relapse after initial treatment. REUTERS/Courtesy KPIX TV/Handout Dramatic scientific advances since HIV was first discovered 30 years ago this week mean the virus is no longer a death sentence. Thanks to tests that detect HIV early, new antiretroviral AIDS drugs that can control the virus for decades, and a range of ways to stop it being spread, 33.3 million people around the world are learning to live with HIV. People like Vuyiseka Dubula, an HIV-positive AIDS activist and mother in Cape Town, South Africa, can expect relatively normal, full lives. “I’m not thinking about death at all,” she says. “I’m taking my treatment and I’m living my life.”   Nonetheless, on the 30th birthday of HIV, the global scientific community is setting out with renewed vigor to try to kill it. The drive is partly about science, and partly about money. Treating HIV patients with lifelong courses of sophisticated drugs is becoming unaffordable. Caring for HIV patients in developing countries alone already costs around $13 billion a year and that could treble over the next 20 years. In tough economic times, the need to find a cure has become even more urgent, says Francoise Barre Sinoussi, who won a Nobel prize for her work in identifying Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). “We have to think about the long term, including a strategy to find a cure,” she says. “We have to keep on searching until we find one.”   The Berlin patient is proof they could. His case has injected new energy into a field where people for years believed talk of a cure was irresponsible. Timothy Ray Brown was living in Berlin when besides being HIV-positive, he had a relapse of leukemia. He was dying. In 2007, his doctor, Gero Huetter, made a radical suggestion: a bone marrow transplant using cells from a donor with a rare genetic mutation, known as CCR5 delta 32. Scientists had known for a few years that people with this gene mutation had proved resistant to HIV. “We really didn’t know when we started this project what would happen,” Huetter, an oncologist and haematologist who now works at the University of Heidelberg in southern Germany, told Reuters. The treatment could well have finished Brown off. Instead he remains the only human ever to be cured of AIDS. “He has no replicating virus and he isn’t taking any medication. And he will now probably never have any problems with HIV,” says Huetter. Brown has since moved to San Francisco. Most experts say it is inconceivable Brown’s treatment could be a way of curing all patients. The procedure was expensive, complex and risky. To do this in others, exact match donors would have to be found in the tiny proportion of people — most of them of northern European descent — who have the mutation that makes them resistant to the virus. Dr Robert Gallo, of the Institute of Virology at the University of Maryland, puts it bluntly. “It’s not practical and it can kill people,” he said last year. Sinoussi is more expansive. “It’s clearly unrealistic to think that this medically heavy, extremely costly, barely reproducible approach could be replicated and scaled-up ... but from a scientist’s point of view, it has shown at least that a cure is possible,” she says. The International AIDS Society will this month formally add the aim of finding a cure to its HIV strategy of prevention, treatment and care. A group of scientist-activists is also launching a global working group to draw up a scientific plan of attack and persuade governments and research institutions to commit more funds. Money is starting to flow. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is asking for proposals for an $8.5 million collaborative research grant to search for a cure, and the Foundation for AIDS Research, or amfAR, has just announced its first round of four grants to research groups “to develop strategies for eradicating HIV infection.”   Until recently, people in HIV and AIDS circles feared that to direct funds toward the search for a cure risked detracting from the fight to get HIV-positive people treated. Even today, only just over five million of the 12 million or so people who need the drugs actually get them. HIV first surfaced in 1981, when scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered it was the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). An article in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of that June referred to “five young men, all active homosexuals” from Los Angeles as the first documented cases. “That was the summer of ‘81. For the world it was the beginning of the era of HIV/AIDS, even though we didn’t know it was HIV then,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has made AIDS research his life’s work. In the subsequent three decades, the disease ignorantly branded “the gay plague” has become one of the most vicious pandemics in human history. Transmitted in semen, blood and breast milk, HIV has devastated poorer regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, where the vast majority of HIV-positive people live. As more tests and treatment have become available, the number of new infections has been falling. But for every two with HIV who get a chance to start on AIDS drugs, five more join the “newly infected” list. United Nations data show that despite an array of potential prevention measures — from male circumcision to sophisticated vaginal or anal microbicide gels — more than 7,100 new people catch the virus every day. Treatment costs per patient can range from around $150 a year in poor countries, where drugs are available as cheap generics, to more than $20,000 a year in the United States. The overall sums are huge. A recent study as part of a non-governmental campaign called AIDS2031 suggests that low and middle-income countries will need $35 billion a year to properly address the pandemic by 2031. That’s almost three times the current level of around $13 billion a year. Add in the costs of treatment in rich countries and experts estimate the costs of HIV 20 years from now will reach $50 to $60 billion a year. “It’s clear that we have to look at another possible way of managing of the epidemic beyond just treating everyone forever,” says Sharon Lewin, a leading HIV doctor and researcher from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. In some ways, we have been here before. Early AIDS drugs such as AZT came to market in the late 1980s, but within a decade they were overtaken by powerful cocktail treatments known as HAART, or highly active antiretroviral treatment. HAART had a dramatic effect — rapidly driving the virus out of patients’ blood and prompting some to say a cure was just around the corner. But then scientists discovered HIV could lie low in pools or reservoirs of latent infection that even powerful drugs could not reach. Talk of a cure all but died out. “Scientifically we had no means to say we were on the way to finding a cure,” says Bertrand Audoin, executive director of the Geneva-based International AIDS Society. “Scientists ... don’t want to make any more false promises. They didn’t want to talk about a cure again because it really wasn’t anywhere on the horizon.”   The ultimate goal would allow patients to stop taking AIDS drugs, knocking a hole in a $12 billion-a-year market dominated by Californian drugmaker Gilead and the likes of Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Merck. It’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, but Brown’s case has opened the door to new ideas. “What it proved was that if you make someone’s cells resistant to HIV...then all the last bits of HIV, that hang around for a long time in patients on treatment, did in fact decay and disappear,” says Lewin. Now scientists working on mimicking the effect of the Berlin patient’s transplant have had some success. One experimental technique uses gene therapy to take out certain cells, make them resistant to HIV and then put them back into patients in the hope they will survive and spread. At an HIV conference in Boston earlier this year, American researchers presented data on six patients who had large numbers of white blood cells known as CD4 cells removed, manipulated to knock out the existing CCR5 gene, and then replaced. “It works like scissors and cuts a piece of genetic information out of the DNA, and then closes the gap,” says Huetter. “Then every cell arising from this mother cell has this same mutation.”   Early results showed the mutated cells managed to survive inside the bodies of the patients at low levels, remaining present for more than three months in five. “This was a proof of concept,” says Lewin. Another potential avenue is a small group of patients known as “elite controllers”, who despite being infected with HIV are able to keep it under control simply with their own immune systems. Researchers hope these patients could one day be the clue to developing a successful HIV/AIDS vaccine or functional cure. Scientists are also exploring ways to “wake up” HIV cells and kill them. As discovered in the late 1990s, HIV has a way of getting deep into the immune system itself — into what are known as resting memory T-cells — and going to sleep there. Hidden away, it effectively avoids drugs and the body’s own immune response. “Once it goes to sleep in a cell it can stay there forever, which is really the main reason why we can’t cure HIV with current drugs,” says Lewin. Her team in Melbourne and another group in the United States are about to start the first human trials using a drug called SAHA or vorinostat, made by Merck and currently used in cancer treatment, which has shown promise in being able to wake up dormant HIV. As scientists begin to talk up a cure, the old question of whether that’s the right goal has re-emerged. Seth Berkley, a medical epidemiologist and head of the U.S.-based International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) is concerned. An HIV-positive person holds a placard during a programme organized to mark World AIDS Day in Kathmandu December 1, 2010. To match Special Report AIDS/ REUTERS/Deepa Shrestha “From a science point of view, it’s a fabulous thing to do. It’s a great target and a lot of science will be learned. But from a public health point of view, the primary thing you need to do is stop the flow of new infections,” says Berkley. “We need a prevention revolution. That is absolutely critical.”   Vuyiseka Dubula agrees. The South African activist finds talk of a cure for HIV distracting, almost disconcerting. “This research might not yield results soon, and even when it does, access to that cure is still going to be a big issue,” she says. “So in the meantime, while we don’t have the answer on whether HIV can be cured or not, we need to save lives.”

SOLUTION: Special Report: An end to AIDS?.

PROBLEM: "On Nov. 27, 2013, a Madison-based liberal advocacy group used a mass email to promote protests that were planned against Walmart stores for two days later -- Black Friday. The demonstrations aimed to ""expose Wal-Mart’s shameful labor practices and support workers,"" according to One Wisconsin Now, which then made this claim: ""The Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart, controls a fortune equal to the wealth of the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined."" That reminded us of a March 2011 claim by filmmaker and liberal activist Michael Moore. He said in a Madison speech that 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined. Based on online hits, it became one of our most popular fact-checks ever. So we wondered about the Walmart claim. Wealth, not income In the days before and after Black Friday, leaders no less prominent than President Barack Obama and Pope Francis decried the extent of income disparity in the United States and around the world. Obama called the growing income gap a ""defining challenge of our time."" The pope said that while the earnings of a minority ""are growing exponentially, so, too, is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few."" Walmart, of course, is a big target. According to Forbes, as of May 2013 the international retailer had $469 billion in sales and 2.2 million employees, including 1.3 million in the United States. The corporation has been criticized for low wages; and in December 2012, PolitiFact National rated as Mostly  a claim that more Walmart employees are on Medicaid and food stamps than other companies. But let’s be clear up front: Although income and wealth are related, they’re not the same. Wealth is commonly measured in terms of net worth -- the value of a person’s assets minus liabilities. So, things like savings and retirement accounts, minus what is owed on a home mortgage, credit cards, etc. That means a person with heavy debt can have little wealth, or negative wealth, even while earning a six-figure income. One more point before we get to the wealth figures. Walmart was founded by the late Sam Walton, who opened the first store in Arkansas in 1962. Walmart incorporated in 1969 and became a publicly traded company a year later. So, Wal-Mart is not family owned, but rather owned by its stockholders; on the other hand, according to Bloomberg and other news reports, the Walton family members still have control of the company, owning about half of the shares. Group's evidence Scot Ross, One Wisconsin Now's executive director, told us his evidence to back his group’s claim is a July 2012 article by economist Josh Bivens, research and policy director of the liberal Economics Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Bivens wrote that in 2010, the wealth of six Walton family heirs was $89.5 billion, 22 percent higher than in 2007. Meanwhile, the median wealth of American families in 2010 was $77,300, nearly 39 percent lower than three years earlier. (Median wealth refers to the American family that is exactly wealthier than half of all families and less wealthy than half.) As for measuring one against the other, Bivens said the Walton family wealth in 2010 was as large as the wealth of the bottom 48.8 million families in the United States, or 41.5 percent of all American families. Rounded up, 41.5 percent would be 42 percent, the figure One Wisconsin Now claims. But let's keep shopping around a little. Similar claim It turns out that a statement nearly identical to the one made by One Wisconsin Now was uttered in July 2012 by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats. Sanders said the Walton family owns ""more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America,"" a claim PolitiFact National rated . Our colleagues found that Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley, compared the Waltons’ cumulative net worth with that of the overall population, as cited in the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. That survey was published in August 2012. Allegretto found that the Waltons’ wealth in 2010 was valued at $89.5 billion -- equal to the entire bottom 41.5 percent of American families. The 2010 figures are the latest available for doing comparisons with the net worth of the overall population. But we found, using the Forbes 400 list for 2013, that the wealth of six of Sam Walton’s descendants has continued to grow. Here are their rankings and their wealth: No. 6 Christy Walton (daughter-in-law), $35.4 billion No. 7: Jim Walton (son), $33.8 billion No. 8: Alice Walton (daughter), $33.5 billion No. 9: S. Robson Walton (son), $33.3 billion No. 95: Ann Walton Kroenke (niece), $4.7 billion No. 110: Nancy Walton Laurie (niece), $4 billion Total Walton family wealth: $144.7 billion. A note before we close: Allegretto told us the housing crisis is a key reason that the gap between the Walton family wealth and the wealth of other American families has grown. More Americans were left with ""negative wealth"" because they lost their biggest asset -- their home -- and often significant amounts of their savings, as well, she said. Our rating One Wisconsin Now wrote: ""The Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart, controls a fortune equal to the wealth of the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined."" For comparison purposes, the latest data available, for 2010, the figure is 41.5 percent. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's website."

SOLUTION: The Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart, controls a fortune equal to the wealth of the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined.

PROBLEM: "The story does not mention costs, but it is understandable that pricing may not be available with a drug so early in development. The story does a good job of quantifying the benefits of treatment in absolute terms by providing the actual number of months with no new lesions for both the new drug group and the standard treatment group. The story mentions that potential harms of the drug include a drop in white blood cells, back pain and fatigue. The story adequately describes the design of the current study. The story accurately describes the study as ""small"" and ""preliminary."" The story does not overstate the seriousness or prevalence of melanoma. The story quotes one independent expert in addition to a representative of the company. The story does mention that ""there are very few drugs available for people with advanced melanoma."" However, the story could have elaborated on the available alternatives and how this new drug may fit in with the existing options. The story clearly states that the drug is in very early stages of development and has not yet been submitted for approval. The story clearly states that the drug is new. There is no way to know if the story relied on a press release as the sole source of information."

SOLUTION:
Skin cancer drug said to show promise