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:
"Veterans groups in Pennsylvania typically prepare for Memorial Day by placing small American flags beside the headstones where fallen service members have been laid to rest. When a state lawmaker from Erie County learned that the coronavirus might scuttle that sacred tradition, he posted about it on Facebook. ""Gov. Wolf is not allowing companies that distribute U.S. flags to ship out orders to be placed at veteran’s graves for Memorial Day,"" Pa. House Rep. Brad Roae posted on Facebook on May 11. We wondered whether Wolf had really blocked Pennsylvania-based American flag distributors from operating during the pandemic. Roae, a Republican, did not return a call seeking comment on his Facebook post, which has now been shared more than 7,000 times. But it looks like he was right. Not only did Wolf exclude FlagZone, a manufacturer located in Gilbertsville, from his original list of life-sustaining businesses permitted to operate during the pandemic, his administration doubled down and rejected the company’s application for a waiver. FlagZone is one of the only American flag manufacturer in Pennsylvania and one of only a half dozen across the country. The company typically distributes more than six million small stick flags annually. Casey Smith, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Community & Economic Development, told The Reading Eagle that the Wolf administration’s top priority is protecting the health and well-being of Pennsylvanians, and that flag-making, while patriotic, simply wasn’t ""life-sustaining."" ""Memorial Day celebrations and ceremonies are a staple in our nation, and many Pennsylvanians will need to adjust their routine this year to accommodate our new normal,"" Smith said. ""We encourage all Pennsylvanians to honor our nation’s fallen in their own special way."" Turns out the flags had already been manufactured and were sitting in a warehouse. FlagZone President Daniel Ziegler said it would only take a few workers to ship 400,000 flags that had been ordered by 24 different Pennsylvania counties in anticipation of Monday’s federal holiday. Bucks, Chester and Delaware counties were among those waiting to receive their orders. When State Sen. Scott Hutchinson learned about FlagZone’s woes, he also called on Wolf to ease restrictions imposed on the company. ""I see no reason why the time-honored and solemn tradition of placing flags at veterans’ graves could not be continued this year,"" Hutchinson, a Republican who represents Butler and other Western Pennsylvania counties, said in a statement sent to reporters via email. ""Certainly placing the flags in cemeteries could be done while practicing the social distancing Gov. Wolf recommends."" On Monday, FlagZone got some good news. The state cleared the way for the company to ship some flag orders even as it held firm that flag manufacturing is not essential during the pandemic. ""We’re just excited to get these flags out after months of being shut down,"" Ziegler told The Reading Eagle. ""Hopefully, when a family goes to the gravesite of a loved one who was a veteran they will now see that they were not forgotten."" Smith, of the community and economic development department, said in an interview that special approval from the state is not required for limited shipping activities and communicated  that to FlagZone. Roae posted on Facebook that Gov. Wolf had blocked companies that distribute American flags from shipping orders ahead of Memorial Day. Wolf initially blocked FlagZone from operating during the pandemic and then rejected the company’s request for a waiver. A state official later said the company did not need special permission to ship limited numbers of flags. However, the company didn’t understand this until the state said so, especially since the clarification came days after the Wolf administration rejected FlagZone’s application to resume operations."
answer:
“Gov. Wolf is not allowing companies that distribute U.S. flags to ship out orders to be placed at veteran’s graves for Memorial Day.”


question:
The two on Thursday toured a Lowndes County neighborhood where residents say the sewage system regularly overflows into their yards and homes. They then held a town hall in Hayneville. Charlie Mae Holcombe, 70, of Hayneville, said heavy rains are always a sign of trouble. Holcombe described the problems she faced as Gore and Barber spoke with her in her driveway. She said the toilets in her house will begin to bubble as a sign the sewage system is about to backup, sometimes filling her yard — including the area around a child’s swing set — and her house with raw sewage. “They have had to come and pump it out of my yard with the pump truck,” Holcombe said. “It’s backing up, even in my bathtub. The sewage has run over all in the house.” Her home in Lowndes County is in an area that has been plagued by sewage problems and concerns about potential illness. “I have heard about it and seen pictures of it for a long time, but it was shocking to see it in person,” Gore said of the conditions he saw. Alabama’s Black Belt region gets its name for the dark rich soil that once gave rise to cotton plantations. But the type of soil makes it difficult for traditional septic tanks, in which wastewater filters through the ground, to function properly, said Alabama State Health Officer Scott Harris in an interview with The Associated Press. The region’s intense poverty and inadequate municipal infrastructure contribute to the problem. “Sewage is typically handled at a local level... These counties haven’t always been able to do that,” Harris said. Catherine Coleman Flowers, an activist who has worked on rural environmental issues in the county for years, said wastewater sanitation problems are not limited to Alabama’s Black Belt. “It’s all over the country,” Flowers said, adding that climate change, with heavy rains and rising water tables, will make it worse. Holcombe said she’s not sure what it means, but when a red light flashes at a sewage treatment lagoon across the street, it is a reliable sign that her yard will flood. In addition to overwhelmed septic and sewage systems, some homes in the rural county are on “straight pipe” systems where sewage runs untreated from home to yard. Harris said a May survey of almost 200 Lowndes County households found that two to three percent of the households were on straight pipe systems. Holcombe’s home sits not far from the state highway where voting rights marchers walked from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Barber noted the proximity to the key sites of the civil rights movement and said the environmental issues are about the continued fight for justice. The town hall, held at a community center in Hayneville, focused on a number of environmental issues. Birmingham resident Jimmy Smith described living near a Superfund site in Birmingham. Others described concerns about landfills, straight pipe sewage systems and coal ash disposal in the Black Belt. At the town hall, Gore criticized what he described as the continued resistance from power companies and politicians to switching to renewable forms of energy such as solar energy. “It’s really a disgrace that this far Southern state with abundant sunshine is deprived of the advantages of the solar revolution being enjoyed all over the world,” Gore said.
answer:
Environmental justice issues focus of town hall.


question:
Although it is not known how much abaloparatide will cost at this stage, the article does discuss the cost of its would-be competitor, Forteo, which costs about $2,500 a month for those without insurance. The story does a good job discussing the quantitative evidence from the study. (The few missteps, which are actually quite critical in their nature, were related to a not-entirely-adequate grasp of the study design. This we discuss in detail in a separate criterion, Quality of Evidence, below.) The story discusses several measures by which the effectiveness of abaloparatide was compared to the placebo (and Forteo), including the number of spine fractures, the number of other types of fractures, and the number of cases of hypercalcemia. And it does so using actual numbers. For example: “Fewer women on the injectable drug abaloparatide had spine fractures (0.58 percent) than women receiving a placebo (4.22 percent)…” The story lists nausea and heart palpitations among the serious side effects of both abaloparatide and Forteo. The story contains a subtle misunderstanding of the study design that leads it to misinterpret the quantitative evidence for abaloparatide and Forteo. The study’s presentation of the quantitative results suggest that the figures can be directly juxtaposed for the two drugs, when this is not actually the case. Toward the end of the research article on which the story is based, we have the following statement: “Comparison of abaloparatide vs teriparatide [Forteo] for the primary efficacy end point [cases of spine fractures] was not part of the study objectives because the study would have required a sample size of approximately 22,000 per treatment group to provide 90% power to detect the treatment difference between abaloparatide (observed rate, 0.58%) and teriparatide (observed rate, 0.84%) based on our study results.” This effectively means that comparing the 0.58% observed rate of spine fractures under abaloparatide and the 0.84% rate under Forteo, is, quite simply put, rather meaningless. The clinical trial study was never powered to discover a significant difference between the two, i.e. the study was not designed to be able to detect any meaningful difference. Indeed, the statements by Dr. Caroline Messer, interviewed in the story, and the research article’s accompanying editorial, partly reprinted at the end of the story, both emphasize that this research study does not in fact compare abaloparatide directly to Forteo. Another minor point is that Forteo had to be injected via its trademarked injection pen in the study, rather than subcutaneously as was done with abaloparatide and the placebo. This obviously has implications for the blinded nature of the study. While an ideal clinical trial is double-blinded, in this case both patients and doctors knew when Forteo was being administered. The story shares the fact that “A study based on 2010 U.S. Census data estimated that more than 3 million women between the ages of 50 and 69 have osteoporosis. A 60-year-old woman has a 44 percent lifetime risk of fracture due to low bone density.” An explanation of the term “lifetime risk” would be helpful to the reader. (In this setting, it means the probability of experiencing a fracture during the remaining years of life. In fact, the figure reported is really a “residual lifetime risk.”) Now for a slight tangent: It is great that the story chose to report an absolute risk here rather than a relative risk. This is a point we at HealthNewsReview.org try to hammer home. In a 2007 article in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, Nguyen et. al. in their article titled “Residual lifetime risk of fractures in women and men” had the following comment on relative versus absolute risk: Communication of risk in the osteoporosis field has traditionally relied on the concept of relative risk. However, relative risk can be misleading to patients and clinicians,(42) because the interpretation of a relative risk or its change is highly dependent on the baseline risk. For instance, doubling a minor risk is still minor, but doubling a common risk is alarming. It is therefore desirable that individuals who have BMD measurements be informed about their fracture probability risk category instead of their relative scores. (4) The lifetime risk estimates from this study provide such a means for communication of risk to an individual patient. Dr. Caroline Messer of the Center for Pituitary and Neuroendocrine Disorders at Lenox Hill Hospital was interviewed as an independent source. She correctly pointed out that a head-to-head trial directly comparing Forteo and abaloparatide is needed in the next step of research. The story also discloses that the research study was funded by the maker of abaloparatide, Radius Health. However, the story doesn’t point out that the study author (whom they quote extensively) also serves on a Radius Health Advisory Board. The story describes Forteo, the current dominant drug on the market for treating low bone mineral density. But see Quality of Evidence section above for how this could have been done better. The story states that abaloparatide is currently in a Phase 3 trial stage. The story does not make clear the novelty of abaloparatide, and seems to focus rather on the similarities between it and Forteo. The story does not appear to rely on a news release.
answer:

Injected Drug May Help Fight Osteoporosis in Women