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.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment announced Thursday that students entering kindergarten and first grade will need two doses of a hepatitis A vaccine. Students entering seventh grade will need one dose of the meningococcal ACWY vaccine. And students starting their junior year will need the meningococcal ACWY vaccine if they have not been vaccinated before their 16th birthday. The new requirements take effect Aug. 2. Kansas allows exemptions from vaccines only for medical and religious reasons. Health department Secretary Lee Norman said the agency collected public input before proposing the new requirements. He said meningitis and hepatitis A are both severe diseases that are preventable with vaccines.
2 new vaccines required for some Kansas school students.

The story reports not only the cost of the blood test ($60), but the cost to detect one case (including follow-up), which the researchers calculated to be $28,600. This is excellent context. The story would have been better if it had noted that the people included in this study were at unusually high risk for developing this cancer. The 34 cases found after screening 20,000 people is almost 200 times the typical annual rate in the US and other countries (less than 1 per 100,000 people per year). The ultimate measure of cost is cost-effectiveness (cost per life-year saved) which requires survival data. These analyses can also be adjusted for quality of life. While most of this story is careful to note that this test has yet to show clinical effectiveness, that caution is trampled by the claim that this blood test “boosted patients’ chances of survival,” something that this type of study cannot determine. The claim that this test is more accurate than existing methods is also premature, since the study did not directly compare the blood test to existing methods. Finding more early-stage cancers is a necessary but hardly sufficient step in the pathway of demonstrating benefit for a new screening test. Clinical trials are needed to address issues of false positives, over diagnosis, over treatment, and survival. The story reports that developers of this blood test still need to show low rates of false positive or negative results. A low false negative rate means there are fewer missed cases of serious disease. The trade-off, though, is a higher false positive rate. All positive tests will need to be evaluated with a gold standard diagnostic test and the safety, acceptability, and costs of that gold standard test will profoundly affect the uptake of the new screening test. While the story reports that this study was a “proof-of-concept” experiment, it then says the test boosted survival, something that can only be known after directly comparing the new test to existing methods. Making treatment “dramatically more effective” can be proven only with randomized trials. All screening tests that can detect cancers at an earlier stage will be associated with an apparent increase in survival time, but as explained in more detail below, this does not necessarily mean that patients with screen-detected cancers actually live longer than they would have otherwise. Efficacy can be established only with an RCT. The story could have done a better job pointing out the many limitations in the work. For example, there was no follow-up testing for people who had negative blood test results. Even though the researchers surveyed participants a year after the testing, they didn’t produce any data on how many of the people with negative blood tests actually had cancer. What’s more, the researchers compared the survival rates of their patients to a different group of cancer patients from another study, which raises questions about how comparable the groups really are. There was also no discussion of the possibility that at least some of the tumors discovered through this screening might not have developed into dangerous cancers. The story does not address lead-time bias (that longer survival might be at least partly due to finding the tumor earlier in its natural course, rather than to just the effect of treatment). The researchers noted that the effect of lead time bias can only really be known through a randomized, controlled trial. We will rate the story satisfactory on this criterion because it is careful to note that this test is not ready for clinical use and that the study results apply to only one type of cancer. However, the story would have been better if it had pointed out just how rare this cancer is, less than one case per 100,000 people in the US per year. That is about 3,000 cases in the US per year — out of about 1.7 million cancers diagnosed annually. And the comment that the cancer “is prevalent” in southern China and Southeast Asia may be misleading. While it may occur more often in the region, rates are still on the order of 10 to 20 per 100,000 which is hardly widespread. The story squeaks by on this criterion because it includes a quote from an editorial in the journal that was written by an independent source. It would have been more useful to readers to include more comment and context from someone without financial ties to this study. The story is upfront about the financial interests of the researchers themselves and the company that owns the rights to their work, noting the keen interest in bringing this test to market. Although the story reports that “that nasopharyngeal carcinoma typically goes undetected until later on, when patients report symptoms such as recurring nosebleeds,” it does not tell readers anything about how often these cancers are found at an early stage. Readers are not given a sense of how patients typically fare with existing methods of diagnosis. The story clearly reports that the test is still experimental and that developers have yet to show that it could be practical and effective in clinical practice. The story highlights the desire for a new blood test that could be clinically useful. The story doesn’t appear to rely on a news release. It includes quotes from a telephone interview with an executive at the company developing this test.
Silicon Valley Startup Grail Sees Hope for Cancer Blood Test

"Sen. Barack Obama, speaking to veterans, lashed into his opponent for poor military judgment, alleging Sen. John McCain had fixated on Iraq immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. ""Sen. McCain was already turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, and he became a leading supporter of an invasion and occupation of a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and that — as despicable as Saddam Hussein was — posed no imminent threat to the American people,"" Obama said on Aug. 19, 2008. ""Two of the biggest beneficiaries of that decision were al-Qaida's leadership, which no longer faced the pressure of America's focused attention; and Iran, which has advanced its nuclear program, continued its support for terror, and increased its influence in Iraq and the region."" Obama's analysis of the war's consequences aside, we checked the record to see whether he had fairly characterized McCain's views about Iraq after 9/11 and in the run-up to the war. As a military veteran and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain was a prominent voice in late 2001 as the nation grappled with how to respond to the attacks. On Sept. 12, 2001, he appeared on  Hardball with Chris Matthews,  where Matthews asked whether the appropriate response should be ""a legal matter or a military matter."" ""I think it's both,"" McCain replied. ""As — as we stated, the — a nation has the right to defend itself, No. 1. But No. 2, these organizations could not flourish effectively unless they had the help and assistance and safe harbor of these nations. And it isn't just Afghanistan — we're talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others."" That comment was not particularly specific to Iraq. But in an Oct. 18, 2001, appearance on the  Late Show with David Letterman,  with the nation on edge about the anthrax mailings and in the early stages of the campaign in Afganistan, McCain singled out Iraq. After sharing his views about how events were unfolding in Afghanistan, McCain told Letterman: ""I think we'll do fine. The second phase — if I could just make one, very quickly — the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don't have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq."" In January 2002, while touring the flight bridge of an aircraft carrier on the Arabian Sea, McCain shouted: ""Next up: Baghdad!"" He fleshed out his views in a speech at a NATO security policy conference in Munich on Feb. 2, 2002. ""Terrorist training camps exist on Iraqi soil, and Iraqi officials are known to have had a number of contacts with al-Qaida. These were probably not courtesy calls,"" he said. ""Americans have internalized the mantra that Afghanistan represents only the first front in our global war on terror. The next front is apparent, and we should not shrink from acknowledging it. A terrorist resides in Baghdad, with the resources of an entire state at his disposal, flush with cash from illicit oil revenues and proud of a decade-long record of defying the international community's demands that he come clean on his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction."" We should note that McCain suggested on several occasions that he would prefer alternatives to full-on invasion and occupation as a means of displacing Saddam Hussein, such as on  Meet the Press  on July 14, 2002: ""I have always strongly felt that you must try the option of opposition from within — arming, training, equipping and helping oppositions from within; the Kurds in the North, the Shiites in the South,"" McCain told the late Tim Russert. ""At least try that option before we send Americans into harm's way."" But two days later on  Face the Nation,  he made clear that if it took war to remove Hussein, he was all for it. ""Look, we need a regime change in Iraq,"" he said. ""If we can do it on the cheap by having operations involving just Special Forces and some air power and opponents within, either the Kurds in the south, Shiites in the north [sic], then that's fine. But we have to be prepared to do whatever is necessary to bring about this regime change. I think we also ought to prepare the American public in — in — by way of informing them that Saddam Hussein has these weapons, continues to attempt to improve the — their capability and would not be reluctant to export them to other countries."" He continued, ""So we need to keep telling the American people that as well, as well as basically — if I may be so blunt — frightening them — frightening and scaring them every day."" In early 2003, with calls for invasion of Iraq growing more insistent, McCain's was among the most fervent voices. ""Sept. 11, 2001 showed that al-Qaida is a grave threat,"" he wrote in a Feb. 14, 2003 opinion piece in  USA Today. ""Saddam Hussein has the ability to make a far worse day of infamy by turning Iraq into a weapons assembly line for al-Qaida's network. ... Saddam is an international felon who has repeatedly violated the terms of his parole and is planning further crimes with his terrorist accomplices. He must be brought to justice once and for all."" The record clearly supports the contention that McCain ""was already turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11"" — indeed he singled out Iraq on  Letterman  — and became a ""leading supporter"" of the war, as Obama said. We find his claim to be ."

Sen. McCain was already turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, and he became a leading supporter of an invasion and occupation of (Iraq).