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.

Q: Paragraph: The California deaths were caused by a strain of the influenza virus that is sending sufferers across the nation to the doctor for flu-like symptoms at rates that are 50 percent higher than normal, said Lyn Finelli, head of the influenza surveillance and outbreak response team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That’s way above the norm for flu,” Finelli said. “It tells us we’re still in the middle of flu season, and in the Northeast and California it’s going up, up, up.”  The flu strain responsible for the California deaths, H1N1, also predominates nationwide this year. It hits people hardest between the ages of 25 and 64, partly because some older people are believed to have more immunity due to similar outbreaks many decades ago. In California, 52 people died last week alone, including one child, the state’s chief of communicable disease control told reporters on a conference call Friday. “This influenza season continues to be a severe one as the increasing number of influenza-related deaths indicates,” Ron Chapman, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement, urging Californians to get vaccinated. In addition to the 147 confirmed California flu-related fatalities this season among people under age 65, another 44 suspected flu deaths remain under investigation, said Dr. James Watt, chief of the state’s Division of Communicable Disease Control. Most of those felled by the disease had other health conditions, but not all, he said. Last year at the same time, the state had recorded just 14 flu deaths among Californians under age 65. The death of a 47-year-old television advertising executive in the state’s capital city prompted a renewed call for residents to become vaccinated against flu. Sacramento County, with 21 deaths so far, leads the state in fatalities. “After reading the heartbreaking story of Nancy Pinnella, went to CVS and got my first flu shot ever,” California’s first lady, Anne Gust Brown, posted on Twitter. It is not fully clear whether California is an outlier in the severity of its cases, because states are not required to report flu deaths to the CDC, and data is collected differently from state to state and county to county, said CDC spokesman Jason McDonald. The fatality data that the public health agency does collect, on pediatric deaths, is not useful in studying H1N1, because the virus is more likely to attack adults, Finelli said. The public health agency does, however collect information on why people go to the doctor, and whether they are hospitalized for flu. Those signs, she said, show that this year’s flu is likely to continue to hit hard. Although the number of cases nationwide appears to have plateaued, she said, that does not take into account that California and the Northeast are lagging other areas with a late flu season. Meanwhile, CDC data does show that far more people under the age of 65 are being hospitalized with flu-like symptoms than last year. As of last week, for example, 76 percent of those hospitalized for flu were under age 65, compared to less than 50 percent last year. Nationwide, the data shows that somewhat fewer people have contracted flu so far this year than last year, Finelli said. This year’s strain, however, appears to be causing severe illness in a population that is more typically robust, she said. Claim: California sees high rate of flu deaths in unusually severe season.

A: An unusually severe flu season has claimed the lives of at least 147 young and middle-aged people in California - 10 times the number killed by influenza viruses by the same time last year, public health officials said on Friday.
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Q: Paragraph: Yet nothing prepared residents of its oldest town, Graaff-Reinet, for their worst drought in more than a century. As the dry spell entered its fourth year, tap water turned brown and smelled like rotting fish. When the water behind the Nqweba Dam dried up, depositing tens of thousands of dead fish onto cracked earth, queues began forming at municipal bore holes and farm animals died in their hundreds. The bleak choices facing millions of people in drought-stricken southern Africa - whether to flush toilets or not, or to keep animals alive or let them die - could soon be faced by other places on a warming planet with shrinking water supplies. “This area is dry but our taps have never been completely empty. Never,” said Bukelwa Booysen, who has had to send staff in search of borehole water for her school for disabled children, and send the kids home when they can’t find any. An abnormally hot summer with rainfall 75% below average, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has struck the whole region. The United Nations says 45 million people in southern Africa face hunger. Bushes and trees clinging to the Karoo’s rocky ravines are withered and grey - even hardy acacia thorns are dying. Signs mark rivers that are now dry beds. At one farm, Gerrie Snyman, 65, was feeding grain to sheep and goats that couldn’t find pasture. More than a third of his couple-thousand goats and sheep had either died or been sold this year. His 80 cows were now 15. He loaded a calf that was starving - its mother had stopped producing milk - onto his truck to take home and shoot. A friend had shot himself dead after his animals died of thirst. “We are grateful to the Almighty for our borehole water,” he said. “We don’t know what we’ll do when it runs out.”   When Cape Town’s reservoir nearly ran dry 18 months ago, it made international headlines and authorities rationed water. Yet Karoo is long past water rationing. For Valentia Esho, 45, an unemployed mother of seven in the township of Umazisakhe, it means letting her toilet fill up  instead of flushing, never washing clothes and only washing plates that stink. Water is just for drinking. “The house is really smelling,” she said, inside her one-room brick-and-tin home. “Everyone is paining from stomach aches and diarrhoea.”   In another township, Asherville, where wind kicked up dust devils, school headmaster Basil Vaaltyn was overseeing water distribution from a truck. He’d done everything to cut down on his usage: “I’m down to a minute showering instead of two.” His wife saves dirty dishwater to fill the cistern. A spokesman for the municipality said it was drilling boreholes, installing pipelines and building an 18-million-litre reservoir, adding: “Usage of water is still very high. The community is requested to use water sparingly.”  With municipal authorities overwhelmed, South African charity Gift of the Givers is trucking water to townships and drilling boreholes. Gideon Groenewald, a geohydrologist for the charity, uses science and spirituality to look for groundwater. When he was growing up on a farm, he used to dowse with wet twigs. Nowadays he prefers magnetic detectors. “I open Google maps and look for the lines of trees. I ask God in prayer which lines hold water, then I go down to that GPS location,” he said while a forked stick turned in his hand over an arid patch of shrubs. “You see the stick moving where the magnetic field is? There’s water here,” he continued. “It’s pure science.”  The charity has drilled 1,800 boreholes in the past three years, Groenewald said, only a third of them dry. But Louise Stafford, water director for the Nature Conservancy in South Africa, urged caution with boreholes, because groundwater is a finite resource. Water-intensive agriculture like citrus farms can make droughts worse, she said, and leaky pipes are losing a billion litres a year - problems Water Minister Lindiwe Sisulu pledged to tackle in a new water masterplan she delivered on Thursday. One Sunday, as clouds formed over Graaff-Reinet, its Assembly Church prayed. The clouds spat but didn’t pour. “We pray for God to open heaven and send rain,” Pastor Dolan Cochrane said. The congregation bowed. “Lord,” Cochrane continued. “We know that, in your time, you will come to our rescue.” Claim: South Africa's Karoo drills and prays as taps run dry.

A: South Africa’s Karoo region has always been parched - it means land of thirst in the language of its earliest inhabitants, the Khoisan hunter gatherers.
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Q: Paragraph: Trump said his order was aimed at “making life better and longer for millions” by increasing the supply of donated kidneys, making it easier for patients to have dialysis in the comfort of their own homes and prioritizing the development of an artificial kidney. The changes won’t happen overnight because some initiatives will require new government regulations. Because a severe organ shortage complicates the call for more transplants, the Trump administration will try to ease the financial hardships for living donors by reimbursing them for expenses such as lost wages and child care. “Those people, I have to say, have never gotten enough credit,” Trump said. “What they do is so incredible.” Another key change: steps to help the groups that collect deceased donations do a better job. Trump said it may be possible to find 17,000 more kidneys and 11,000 other organs from deceased donors for transplant every year. For families like those of 1-year-old Hudson Nash, the lack of organs is frightening. Hudson was born with damaged kidneys, and his parents hope he will be big enough for a transplant in another year. Until then, “to keep him going, he takes numerous medicines, receives multiple shots, blood draws and more doctors’ visits than I can count,” said his mother, Jamie Nash of Santa Barbara, California. Today’s system favors expensive, time-consuming dialysis in large centers — what Trump called so onerous “it’s like a full-time job” — over easier-to-tolerate at-home care or transplants that help patients live longer. More than 30 million American adults have chronic kidney disease, costing Medicare a staggering $113 billion. Careful treatment — including control of diabetes and high blood pressure, the two main culprits — can help prevent further kidney deterioration. But more than 700,000 people have end-stage renal disease, meaning their kidneys have failed, and require either a transplant or dialysis to survive. Only about one-third received specialized kidney care before they got so sick. “My health care providers failed me at the beginning of the dialysis continuum,” said transplant recipient Tunisia Bullock of Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Her kidney failure struck while she was being treated for another disease, and she woke up in the hospital attached to a dialysis machine. She told Trump that she hoped the new initiatives help other patients find care “with less confusion and more ease.” More than 94,000 of the 113,000 people on the national organ waiting list need a kidney. Last year, there were 21,167 kidney transplants. Of those, 6,442 were from living donors, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system. “The longer you’re on dialysis, the outcomes are worse,” said Dr. Amit Tevar, a transplant surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who praised the administration’s initiatives. Too often, transplant centers don’t see a kidney patient until he or she has been on dialysis for years, Tevar said. While any transplant is preferable, one from a living donor is best because those organs “work better, longer and faster,” Tevar said. Among the initiatives that take effect first: —Medicare payment changes that would provide a financial incentive for doctors and clinics to help kidney patients stave off end-stage disease. The goal is to lower the number of new kidney failure cases by 25% by 2030. —a bonus to kidney specialists who help prepare patients for early transplant, with steps that can begin even before they need dialysis. —additional Medicare changes so that dialysis providers can earn as much by helping patients get dialysis at home as in the large centers that predominate today. Patients typically must spend hours three or four times a week hooked to machines that filter waste out of their blood. Home options include portable blood-cleansing machines, or what’s called peritoneal dialysis that works through an abdominal tube, usually while patients are sleeping. Today, about 11% of patients in kidney failure get at-home dialysis and an additional 3 percent get an early transplant. By 2025, the goal is to have 80% of people with newly diagnosed kidney failure getting one of those options, officials said. These changes are being put in place through Medicare’s innovation center, created under the Obama-era Affordable Care Act and empowered to seek savings and improved quality. The administration is relying on the innovation center even as it argues in federal court that the law that created it is unconstitutional and should be struck down entirely. Other initiatives will require new regulations, expected to be proposed later this year. Among them: —allowing reimbursement of lost wages and other expenses for living donors, who can give one of their kidneys or a piece of their liver. The transplant recipient’s insurance pays the donor’s medical bills. But donors are out of work for weeks recuperating, and one study found more than one-third of living kidney donors reported lost wages, a median of $2,712, in the year following donation. Details about who pays and who qualifies still have to be worked out. —clearer ways to measure how well the nation’s 58 organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, collect donations from deceased donors. Some do a better job than others, but today’s performance standards are self-reported, varying around the country and making it difficult for government regulators or the OPOs themselves to take steps to improve. “Some OPOs are very aggressive and move forward with getting organs allocated and donors consented, and there are those that are a little more lackadaisical about it,” said Pittsburgh’s Tevar. Unlike the medical advances in transplantation, “we haven’t really made big dents and progress and moves in increasing cadaveric organs or increasing live donor options.” ___ Associated Press writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed to this report. Claim: Trump directs government to revamp care for kidney disease.

A:
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday revamping care for kidney disease so more people whose kidneys fail can have a chance at early transplants and home dialysis, and others don’t get that sick in the first place.
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