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: Washington’s governor banned large public events in three counties on Wednesday, a strategy guided by the work of Trevor Bedford and his colleagues, who have estimated there are currently 1,100 active cases in the state, most of them undiscovered by testing. Like a detective studying fingerprints, Bedford uses the genetic code the virus leaves behind. The dots he connects are mutations in the genetic alphabet of the virus, a 30,000-letter string that changes at the rate of one letter every 15 days. Those tiny mutations don’t change the virus’ effect on people, but they do allow scientists to draw conclusions about how it spreads from person to person. After a person gets tested for the virus with nasal and throat swabs, a small bit of the specimen can be used to rapidly sequence the virus’ genome. That work has been happening, not just in Seattle, but in other labs around the world. Scientists are sharing their results on a public platform where they’ve been sharing influenza genome data since 2008. This week, Bedford’s lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center worked with California researchers to find links between a cluster of cases in the Seattle area and the outbreak on the Grand Princess cruise ship in California. “They all are very similar genetically,” Bedford told The Associated Press. “It seems very possible” that virus from the Washington outbreak made it onto the Grand Princess. Dr. Charles Chiu at the University of California, San Francisco, agreed. He provided genome sequencing of seven samples from infected passengers who got off the Grand Princess this week. An eighth sample from an earlier Grand Princess cruise to Mexico had ties to Washington state, Chiu said, and that person likely seeded the outbreak among passengers on board as the ship left for Hawaii. “The simplest explanation,” Chiu said, is that the earlier Grand Princess passenger had been in Washington state and then seeded the cruise ship outbreak. There’s an alternative explanation, Chiu said. A cruise passenger or crew member was infected in another country, coincidentally by a virus with the same mutations as the Washington state cases. “Common sense tells you it more likely came from Washington,” Chiu said. For most people, the coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover within a few weeks. Based on genome sequencing of 18 Washington state cases, Bedford believes the state outbreak began with one person, perhaps the 35-year-old man who was the first known U.S. case. The coronavirus infection rate in the Seattle Flu Study, a project mapping seasonal flu, indicates there could be 1,100 active COVID-19 infections in the state, although because of limitations in the modeling that number could range from as low as 210 to as high as 2,800 active infections. Health authorities tried to trace all the people who had contact with the first U.S. case, a resident of Snohomish County, north of Seattle, who had visited Wuhan, the Chinese city that was the initial epicenter of the outbreak. He landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Jan. 15 and started feeling sick the next day. On Jan. 19, he visited a clinic in and was hospitalized on Jan. 20. “They did very aggressive contact tracing looking to identify anybody who had had contact with that initial case and sort of concentric circles outward,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. She called Bedford’s work “an interesting hypothesis,” but said the outbreak could have been caused by “a secondary seeding.” Kristian Andersen, a genetic epidemiologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, agreed that the virus was introduced to Washington state by one person and suggested that the active cases probably exceed 1,100. Neither of the conclusions Bedford described is a surprise, he said in an email. “The United States has completely failed to prepare for the pandemic — despite having adequate time — and we currently have one of the lowest capacity for COVID-19 testing,” he wrote. “This continues to be an enormous problem and it is highly likely that we are currently be missing the vast majority of cases occurring across the country.” “Unless our ability to detect cases is transformed within days and aggressive strategies for responses are put in place, within a couple of weeks, we are going to find ourselves in a situation that is very similar to the one currently unfolding in Italy,” Andersen wrote. ___ Associated Press Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support  from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content. ___ Follow AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak Claim: Scientist links 2 state outbreaks with genetic fingerprints.

SOLUTION: A U.S. scientist is helping public health authorities understand and track the coronavirus, turning up clues about how it arrived and spread through Washington state and beyond, including potentially seeding an outbreak on the Grand Princess cruise ship.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: This study was published in December, 2007 in        the Journal of Environmental Health. It was co-authored by Anne        LaGrange Loving and John Perz. The authors collected 76 lemon slices from 21 restaurants on 43 visits in        Patterson, New Jersey. They swabbed both the lemon slice and the        glass on which the slice had been placed and immediately after the glass        had been brought to them. The result was that they found        contamination on both the flesh and the rind of most of the lemon wedges,        although they did not research how it got there. Some of it could        have arrived with the fruit from the field, some of it could have been        through contamination from the hands of employees. Some of it could        have been from contaminated work surfaces. The U.S. Food and Drug        Administration conducted a study in 2004 of both fast food and full        service restaurants. The conclusion was that there was poor personal        hygiene on the part of employees at 31 percent of the fast food        restaurants and more than 41 percent of the full service restaurants. Comments Claim:  The forwarded email appears to be an article        featuring the findings of microbiologist Anne LaGrange Loving who found        that two-thirds of the lemons tested from 21 restaurants were contaminated        with bacteria when added as slices to beverages.   

SOLUTION:
Contaminated Lemon Slices in Restaurants