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.

Paragraph: An early barrage of illness in the South has begun to spread more broadly, and there’s a decent chance flu season could peak much earlier than normal, health officials say. The last flu season to rev up this early was in 2003-2004 — a bad one. Some experts think the early start may mean a lot of suffering is in store, but others say it’s too early to tell. “It really depends on what viruses are circulating. There’s not a predictable trend as far as if it’s early it’s going to be more severe, or later, less severe,” said Scott Epperson, who tracks flu-like illnesses for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are different types of flu viruses, and the one causing illnesses in most parts of the country is a surprise. It’s a version that normally doesn’t abound until March or April. That virus generally isn’t as dangerous to older people — good news, since most flu hospitalizations and deaths each winter occur in the elderly. However, such viruses can be hard on children and people younger than 50. Louisiana was the first state to really get hit hard, with doctors there saying they began seeing large numbers of flu-like illnesses in October. Children’s Hospital New Orleans has already seen more flu cases this fall than it saw all of last winter, said Dr. Toni Gross, the hospital’s chief of emergency medicine. Last month was the busiest ever at the hospital’s emergency department. Officials had to set up a triage system and add extra shifts, Gross said. “It is definitely causing symptoms that will put you in bed for a week,” including fever, vomiting and diarrhea. But the hospital has not had any deaths and is not seeing many serious complications, she said. Health officials tend to consider a flu season to be officially underway when — for at least three weeks in a row — a significant percentage of U.S. doctor’s office visits are due to flu-like illnesses. That’s now happened, CDC officials said this week. The agency on Friday estimated that there have already been 1.7 million flu illnesses, 16,000 hospitalizations, and 900 flu-related deaths nationally. The most intense patient traffic had been occurring in a six states stretching from Texas to Georgia. But in new numbers released Friday, CDC officials said the number of states with intense activity rose last week to 12. Flu is widespread in 16 states, though not necessarily at intense levels in each, the CDC said. Last flu season started off as a mild one but turned out to be the longest in 10 years. It ended with around 49,000 flu-related deaths and 590,000 hospitalizations, according to preliminary estimates. It was bad, but not as bad as the one before it, when flu caused an estimated 61,000 deaths and 810,000 hospitalizations. Those 2017-2018 estimates are new: The CDC last month revised them down from previous estimates as more data — including actual death certificates — came in. In both of the previous two flu seasons, the flu vaccine performed poorly against the nasty predominant virus. It’s too early to say how well the vaccine is performing right now, Epperson said. Epperson said there’s a chance the flu season will peak this month, which would be unusually early. Flu season usually doesn’t hit fever pitch until around February. The early start suggests a lot Americans may be sick at the same time, said Dave Osthus, a statistician who does flu forecasting at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This could be a precursor to something pretty bad. But we don’t know,” he said. Gross is pessimistic. “I, personally, am preparing for the worst,” she said. ___ 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. Claim: US flu season arrives early, driven by an unexpected virus.
The U.S. winter flu season is off to its earliest start in more than 15 years.

Paragraph: Researchers from the University of Glasgow reported the results in the New England Journal of Medicine on Monday. They compared the causes of death of 7,676 Scottish men who played soccer with 23,000 similar men from the general population born between 1900 and 1976. Over a median of 18 years of study, 1,180 players and 3,807 of the others died. The players had a lower risk of death from any cause until age 70. However, they had a 3.5 times higher rate of death from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. In absolute terms, that risk remained relatively small — 1.7% among former players and 0.5% for the comparison group. Former players also were more likely to be prescribed dementia medicines than the others were. The results “should not engender undue fear and panic,” Dr. Robert Stern, a Boston University scientist who has studied sports-related brain trauma, wrote in a commentary published in the journal. The findings in professional players may not apply to recreational, college or amateur-level play, or to women, Stern noted. “Parents of children who headed the ball in youth or high-school soccer should not fear that their children are destined to have cognitive decline and dementia later in life. Rather, they should focus on the substantial health benefits from exercise and participation in a sport that their children enjoy,” while also being aware of the risks of head-balling, Stern wrote. English Football Association chairman Greg Clark said “the whole game must recognize that this is only the start of our understanding and there are many questions that still need to be answered. It is important that the global football family now unites to find the answers and provide a greater understanding of this complex issue.” The association and players’ union sponsored the study. “We need to kick on now and understand what it means, because that’s all an awful lot we don’t know,” English FA chief executive Mark Bullingham said. “We don’t know if concussion was the cause or whether it was heading or whatever or whether it’s the old heavy ball or something entirely different.” But the association’s medical advisory group has not deemed it necessary to issue to change how the game is played, even reducing heading among younger age groups. “In youth football, you might want to reduce the likelihood of aerial challenges,” Bullingham said. “But our research shows this has already been reduced significantly over the years as we change to small size of pitches, move to possession-based football and now rolling substitutes.” Referees across all levels can stop games for three minutes to fully assess head injuries, but some experts believe that is not long enough. The English FA also is pushing soccer’s global lawmaking body for the introduction of concussion substitutes, with an additional player switch or as a temporary replacement. Campaigning to discover more about the long-term impact of head injuries in soccer has been led in England by the family of former England striker Jeff Astle, whose death at age 59 in 2002 was attributed to repeatedly heading heavy, leather balls. In 2017, a British study of brains of a small number of retired players who developed dementia highlighted the degenerative damage possibly caused by repeated blows to the head. ___ AP Chief Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione in Milwaukee 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. ___ More AP soccer: https://apnews.com/Soccer and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports Claim: Study raises fresh dementia concerns from playing pro soccer.
A study of former professional soccer players in Scotland finds that they were less likely to die of common causes such as heart disease and cancer compared with the general population but more likely to die from dementia. The results raise fresh concerns about head-related risks from playing the sport — at least for men at the pro level.

Paragraph: "While Texas Gov. Rick Perry was debating rivals for the Republican presidential nomination on Oct. 11, his campaign was righting ""wrongs"" uttered by the other candidates through a Twitter account called ""PerryTruthTeam."" During the debate, PerryTruthTeam sent out a familiar message: ""Romneycare was model for Obamacare."" The Perry campaign has hit that idea hard. On Oct. 10, Perry posted an online video linking the health care plan that Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, signed in 2006 for his state (dubbed Romneycare by critics) and the one that President Barack Obama signed in 2010 for the country (dubbed Obamacare by critics). We checked whether the Perry campaign’s five-word tweet was on the mark. Perry’s tweet implies that the White House used the Massachusetts law to build its own national law. We’ll begin our examination by noting that even if you’re just looking at the two laws from the outside, without knowing any behind-the-scenes information, they seem pretty similar. Generally, both laws leave in place the major insurance systems: employer-provided insurance for some workers and their families, Medicare for seniors and Medicaid for the poor. Also, both laws require people to buy insurance or pay a penalty, a mechanism called the ""individual mandate."" Both laws also seek to reduce the number of people without health insurance by expanding Medicaid and offering tax breaks to help moderate-income people buy insurance. Finally, companies that don't offer insurance have to pay fines, with exceptions for small business. Some other shared elements:     • Health insurance exchanges. Both the Massachusetts and national plans provide for voluntary ""exchanges"" that individuals and small businesses can use to purchase private-sector health insurance. These exchanges are designed to offer a range of plans with different benefits and premium levels. • Affordability subsidies. Under both plans, lower-income individuals and families can receive government subsidies to help them pay health insurance premiums. In the Massachusetts plan, the subsidies flow to adults living at 150 percent to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, depending on their household size. Under the national plan, the sliding-scale subsidies go up to 400 percent of the poverty level. Still, there remain differences between the federal law and the Massachusetts law. Two of the biggest:        • Cost containment. Critics of the Massachusetts plan have taken it to task for its lack of cost-containment provisions. The federal law makes changes to Medicare that are intended to lower program costs, such as restructuring how payments are made to private insurance plans offered through Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage plans. Since Medicare is a federal program, the Massachusetts plan does not address this issue. • Financing. Both the Massachusetts plan and federal law are financed in part by revenue generated from the individual and employer mandates. But the Massachusetts plan's financing is heavily dependent on leveraging federal matching funds, while the federal law, in addition to cost savings from Medicare, imposes taxes on drug makers, medical device manufacturers, health insurers and indoor tanning services. It also taxes high-cost health care plans. The Massachusetts plan does not do these things. So, the laws, while not identical, share many core elements. Next, we wondered if the federal law was indeed based on the Massachusetts law. Again, it’s difficult to know what people in Congress and in the White House looked at as they drafted the final health care law. But according to independent reports, they consulted people who worked on the Massachusetts law. On its website, the Perry campaign pointed to an NBC News news story published online Oct. 11, 2011, under the headline ""White House used Mitt Romney health-care law as blueprint for federal law."" The report refers to White House visitor logs showing that three health care advisers and experts ""who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006"" had a dozen meetings with senior White House officials in 2009, including one with the president. One of the experts, Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NBC News that ""the White House wanted to lean a lot on what we’d done in Massachusetts."" ""They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model,"" Gruber said. Gruber received a $380,000 contract from the Obama administration in 2009 to help Congress draft the federal health care law based on the Massachusetts plan, according to the story. He earlier had been hired by the Romney administration to do computer modeling of the costs of various approaches to expanding health-care coverage, the story said. Gruber’s biography on the MIT website says he ""was a key architect of Massachusetts’ ambitious health reform effort and in 2006 became an inaugural member of the Health Connector Board, the main implementing body for that effort."" Romney, asked at an Oct. 11 news conference about the NBC report that three of his ""aides"" had advised Obama on health care, disputed that characterization of the experts, saying they were ""consultants,"" not ""aides."" ""I’m sure the president got lots of ideas (on health care reform),"" Romney said, ""but the one person he should have talked to, that he never talked to, was me."" Romney said he would have told Obama that ""the plan he was crafting wouldn’t work"" because the nation couldn’t afford more federal spending. And he said that if he were elected president, he would push for the repeal of the federal health care law. Romney’s campaign has also played down Gruber’s influence, telling Politico for an Oct. 11 news story that he was not an adviser to Romney and that Romney’s administration hired him only to run econometric models. However, the Politico story also says that ""it is well known that Obama’s health care plan was in part modeled after Romney’s 2006 reforms."" We also reviewed an article in the June 6, 2011, New Yorker magazine on the development of the Massachusetts and federal health care laws. Like the NBC News piece, the New Yorker article notes that people who worked on the Massachusetts law were also consulted by the White House. One was Jon Kingsdale, a former insurance executive whom Romney had hired to implement the Massachusetts law, according to the article. ""The policy in Massachusetts was real,"" Kingsdale told the New Yorker. ""We were very, very influential. I testified a lot. The congressional staffers would constantly ask, ‘Well, how do you handle this? How do you handle that?’ We were the go-to people."" The article also describes a meeting in 2008, before Obama had decided to support an individual federal mandate, that was attended by people who would later become ""the key brokers"" of the final deal on the federal health care law in 2010. Among those organizing the meeting was John McDonough — a Massachusetts advocate for universal health care during Romney’s governorship who had since been hired by U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. During the development of the Massachusetts law, McDonough ""was named by Romney aides as a ‘stakeholder’ to represent consumer interests,"" according to the NBC News article. At the October 2008 meeting, McDonough laid out three health care policy options that the next president could adopt, one of which he called ""Massachusetts Avenue"" and was based on Romney’s plan, the New Yorker article says. Fifteen of the 20 people at the meeting — representatives from hospital associations, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, the labor movement and groups advocating universal health care — backed the ""Massachusetts"" option, the article says. The following year, Obama health care adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle sent a memo to the president recommending that he support a mandate like the one in Massachusetts, according to the New Yorker article. A few weeks later, Obama told congressional leaders he would back a requirement that every American buy health insurance. Finally, it’s important to note that some of the key ideas in the federal law had been circulating before the Massachusetts law was written. For example, scholars credit Alain C. Enthoven — an emeritus professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business who worked in the Defense Department during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — with popularizing the idea of health insurance exchanges as many as three decades ago. And at least one previous Republican proposal on health care has included an individual mandate, a plan put forward by Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I., during the Clinton administration’s unsuccessful push for universal coverage in the early 1990s. So, what of Perry’s tweet? Although the federal law isn’t an exact replica of the one in Massachusetts, the plan signed by Romney certainly served as a model." Claim: Romneycare was model for Obamacare.

"Rick Perry says ""Romneycare was model for Obamacare"""