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: The story does a good job of pointing out one advantage of the pill approach compared to delivery via colonoscopy–the reduced cost. “There was a significant difference in cost. Though the procedures were done in a Canadian hospital, the FMTs delivered by colonoscopy cost nearly $500 USD more than the capsules, which cost about $300.” This was a close call. Early on, it says the pill was 90% effective for treating recurrent Clostridium difficile infections. Later on, the story explains that both were equally successful in treating the Clostridium difficile infections. It would take a bit of deduction to figure out that the 90% treatment rate applies to both the pills and colonoscopies. And the study puts this figure close to 96%. But we’ll give the benefit of the doubt and rate it satisfactory. The story gets a satisfactory here for including the differences between the two methods of delivery: One source is quoted saying, “colonoscopies and the anesthesia required for the procedure can put a lot of stress on a person’s body and can be complicated for the people most at risk for C. difficile infections.”  It could have gone a step further and reminded readers that a colonoscopy is an invasive procedure with the inherent risks of infection and perforation that obviously aren’t there when taking a pill. The story did not mention the other adverse events described in the paper such as nausea and vomiting, though. The story comments on the size of the study and quotes a researcher about strengths (a randomized, controlled trial) and limitations (selection bias) of the study. Selection bias, in this case, means many people were excluded from the clinical trial if they had any number of issues (patients with severe or complicated cases were excluded, for example), potentially biasing the results. In a more real-world setting, the effectiveness rate may drop once it’s tried on a wider range of people. No disease mongering here. The story does include comments from an independent source unaffiliated with the research. But, it doesn’t specify that the source has received research money from a drug company that’s developing microbiome drugs. Standard treatment for C. diff is antibiotics. This should have been mentioned. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t spell out whether the pill form FMT is now, or soon will be, available to the public. The story does mention that numerous other clinical trials are using FMT as a possible treatment for various diseases but it is unclear whether the pill form is an option for physicians at this point. What’s new here is that a pill form for delivery of a fecal transplant is being tested against a colonoscopy. The story established this. It does not appear to rely on a news release.

Answer: Fecal transplant via a pill? Newsweek’s coverage points out possible selection bias of study participants


Question: "With the coronavirus pandemic sending automobile miles plummeting — and with it, demand for gasoline — Americans are finding prices at the pump to be lower than they’ve been in years. But New York state remains on the higher end of that range. That’s what WKBW-TV, Buffalo’s ABC affiliate, reported on April 27, citing the American Automobile Association. ""New York is one of only 12 states where the average gallon of gas costs more than $2.00, according to numbers provided by the AAA of Western and Central New York,"" the report said. Is that correct? Yes. We asked AAA for the gas price data for April 27, and they provided us with the full list of 50 states plus the District of Columbia. The data comes from surveys of up to 120,000 gas stations across the country. We looked at the price per gallon for unleaded regular. Here’s the list of states, from most expensive to least expensive:  According to this list, New York, at $2.18 a gallon, was the seventh most expensive state for gasoline, trailing Hawaii, California, Washington state, Oregon, Nevada, and the District of Columbia. (D.C. isn’t a state, but we’ll grant some leeway.) The other five states with gas prices above $2.00 were Arizona, Pennsylvania, Utah, Alaska, and New Jersey. That adds up to 12 states above $2.00, as the statement said, as long as you include D.C. as a state. Three states had gas below $1.40 a gallon: Ohio, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. AAA isn’t the only source of this data. We also looked at data from the wesbite GasBuddy. GasBuddy sent us their own state-by-state prices from April 27 and it shows a similar pattern, but slightly different due to data sampling. New York, at $2.13, was one of eight states with gas prices above $2.00. In descending order, they were Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington state, Nevada, New York, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. That’s fewer than the 12 states that AAA found with $2.00-plus gasoline, but four additional states on the GasBuddy list had prices just under $2.00. Utah, Alaska, the District of Columbia, and New Jersey all had gas prices at between $1.95 and $1.95. One reason why gas prices are relatively high in New York is the tax burden, according to an interactive map produced by the American Petroleum Institute. In 2018, New Yorkers paid more than 45 cents a gallon in state taxes and 18 cents a gallon in federal taxes, for a total of 63 cents a gallon. That’s nearly twice what Ohio motorists pay in taxes. New York is one of just a handful of states where motorists pay more than 49 cents a gallon in gasoline taxes. Since the article appeared, the situation hasn’t changed much. By the following week, only 10 states had average gas prices above $2.00 per gallon, and New York remained one of them. With some states beginning to re-open portions of their economies, gasoline prices have increased slightly in some states, according to AAA and GasBuddy data. But the average price per gallon in the United States had only risen a couple of cents per gallon, In New York, the changes were also minimal. AAA had New York’s average price per gallon at $2.15, while GasBuddy had a slightly lower price, $2.12. A news report cited the American Automobile Association in saying that ""New York is one of only 12 states where the average gallon of gas costs more than $2.00."" AAA provided us the full data, confirming that the statement is correct, as long as the District of Columbia is counted as a state. Among the 50 states and D.C., New York ranked seventh highest in per-gallon prices for regular unleaded. Another gasoline price metric, from GasBuddy, had eight states above $2.00, with four additional states between $1.95 and $1.99."

Answer: “New York is one of only 12 states where the average gallon of gas costs more than $2.00.”


Question: The European Union is trying to nurse its fish stocks back to health after decades of over-exploitation. Deep-sea fish are particularly vulnerable as they reproduce so slowly. The ministers’ decision late on Monday affected just 80 million euros ($104 million) worth of fish, but was seen as an important test case in a series of bruising encounters with European Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki. Damanaki, who started her political career in a 1973 uprising against the then Greek dictatorship, has pledged to put the long-term health of fisheries ahead of short-term profits. Earlier this month, fishing nations led by France rejected her advice that bluefin tuna catches should be halved to give the species a fair chance of survival. In the event, quotas were cut by 4 percent. At Monday’s meeting, catch quotas for deep-sea sharks were set at zero, with zero tolerance from 2012 for the sale of sharks netted while trawling for other species. But conservationists, including WWF and the Pew group, said many sharks would still be scooped up accidentally, then dumped overboard, particularly by French and Spanish boats trawling the deep seabed northwest of Scotland and Ireland. The Atlantic’s main scientific authority, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), says all northeast Atlantic deep-sea species are fished beyond safe biological limits. Ministers admitted that the ICES advice, and that of the EU’s own experts, was worrying. “Both advices indicate that most deep-sea stocks are in a precarious situation, and that fishing opportunities for those stocks, in order to assure their sustainability, should be reduced,” they said in a statement. But worries about the livelihoods of fishermen — mainly French, Spanish and Portuguese — prevented deeper quota cuts. “In spite of several years of commitments to the U.N. to manage deep-sea fisheries sustainably, EU ministers failed to deliver,” said Matthew Gianni of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. “Deep-sea fishing will continue at more or less the same level as in recent years to the detriment of deep-sea species and ecosystems,” said Gianni, who was a deep-sea trawlerman off California before the industry declined in the 90s. The ministers agreed to curb important deep-sea fisheries on the eastern continental slopes of the Atlantic in 2011-12: by up to 7.5 percent annually for black scabbardfish and 13 percent for roundnose grenadiers. Quotas for forkbeards and blue ling were unchanged. Fishermen land about 40,000 tonnes a year of about 70 species of deep-sea fish from the northeast Atlantic, representing about 1.2 percent of total EU fishing. Ministers agreed to continue a ban on fishing for orange roughy, a vulnerable, sluggish red fish that can live for more than 100 years. The orange roughy fishery only became commercialised about 25 years ago, as depletion of inshore species forced fishermen to search further offshore with new technology.

Answer:
Deep-sea sharks protected as EU sets fish quotas.