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: Becerra was discussing the findings of a 147-page report prepared by his office that also found that detainees face long periods of confinement without breaks and language barriers in the 10 detention facilities state authorities inspected in 2017. Becerra said the annual report released Tuesday is the first of 10 that the state Legislature requires of the California Department of Justice, which is tasked with inspecting all federal immigration detention facilities in the state. That law was one of three immigration-related “sanctuary state” bills passed in 2017 that the Trump administration unsuccessfully challenged in court. Inspectors spent one day on scheduled visits at 10 facilities in operation in 2017. ICE contracted with four for-profit prison companies and six county sheriffs to house and care for the inmates. Since then and amid growing protests, sheriffs in Sacramento and Contra Costa counties terminated their contracts with ICE to house federal immigration inmates in the local jails. A third facility near Bakersfield is also facing closure after the city of McFarland told ICE it would not renew its contract when it expires in March. Becerra said many of the problems are caused by inadequate federal oversight. He said a common “challenge” inspectors found at most facilities included confining inmates to their cells for up to 22 hours a day. He noted that most of the detainees are not accused of crimes and are awaiting court decisions on their immigration status. ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley said the private prison companies and county jails that house detainees “must meet rigorous performance standards.” “The safety, rights and health of detainees in ICE’s care are of paramount concern and all ICE detention facilities are subject to stringent, regular inspections,” Haley said. The attorney general’s report estimated that 74,000 immigrant detainees have been held in California detention centers over a three-year period ending in 2017 with an average stay of 50 days per inmate. Becerra said the state inspections of federal immigration facilities in California were necessary “because everyone in this country has constitutional rights and everyone at the end of the day — child and adult — deserve to be treated in a human way.” In a separate report , California’s state auditor Elaine Howle said cities and counties failed to properly monitor the facilities in their locales. Howle’s report also called on ICE to be more transparent in its detention operations. “The state lacks complete information about how much it costs and what conditions the detainees face,” Howle’s report concluded. “Also unclear are how many detainees are being held throughout California, where they are being held, and for how long.” Claim: California officials: Immigration facilities lack oversight.

SOLUTION: Detainees confined to federal immigration detention facilities located in California have inadequate access to health care, lawyers and family, state Attorney General Xavier Becerra said Tuesday.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: In May 2020, a photograph started to circulate on social media supposedly showing a petri dish that was coughed on by a person not wearing a mask and a petri dish coughed on by the same person wearing a mask:  As the Twitter user noted, this image reportedly was taken by lab technician Katie Corley and shared to her public Facebook page. Corley’s original post was shared on May 6 along with a message to the “conspiracy theorists” who were refusing to wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic: Visual experiment for you conspiracy theorists: I coughed on two petri dishes, one while wearing a mask and one not. Shocking! The one on the left with no growth is the one I used a mask for! The one on the right where I didn’t wear a mask is full of bacteria. So yeah, maybe cloth masks don’t give you much protection, but they protect the people around you. Maybe wear one if you insist it’s your constitutional right to eat at Chili’s. We note that many social media users who encountered this photograph made some incorrect assumptions about what it showed. For example, many people seemed to think that the petri dish on the right showed SARS-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus at the center of the current pandemic, and that this photograph demonstrated just how effective masks were at stopping the spread of COVID-19. This photograph, however, simply shows “normal oral flora.”   In an edit to her post, Corley explained that the petri dish on the right contained “normal oral flora,” such as staph species, neisseria species, and corynebacterium. Corley also noted that viruses are much smaller than the bacterium shown in the petri dish, but noted that this small experiment demonstrated how masks can lessen droplet spread that can carry viruses. Corley added: There’s been a lot of questions regarding this experiment, so here’s some answers: 1. I used a cloth mask I made myself with disposable lab coat material. 2. I used blood agar. 3. The plate on the right looks “old” or “stale” because of the growth. Some of the organisms on this plate are alpha hemolytic, meaning they partially hemolyze blood. The agar itself is made with 5% sheep’s blood, so when it’s partially hemolyzed, it turns a dark green color. 4. As for the growth, it’s mostly viridans strep, staph species (not staph aureus), neisseria species, and corynebacterium. Pretty normal oral flora. 5. I realize that viruses are 1,000 times smaller than bacteria. The point of the masks is to prevent droplet spread, which carry bacteria as well as viruses. Corley, of course, was not the first person to notice how face masks lessened droplet transmission. Similar images showing bacteria from a person’s cough growing in a petri dish can also be seen in this article from the Microbiology Society. Rich Davis, the Clinical Microbiology Lab Directory at Providence Sacred Heart, posted a series of images of a similar demonstration: What does a mask do? Blocks respiratory droplets coming from your mouth and throat. Two simple demos: First, I sneezed, sang, talked & coughed toward an agar culture plate with or without a mask. Bacteria colonies show where droplets landed. A mask blocks virtually all of them. pic.twitter.com/ETUD9DFmgU — Rich Davis, PhD, D(ABMM), MLS 🦠🔬🧫 (@richdavisphd) June 26, 2020  Davis, like Corley, emphasized that this was not an experiment showing the efficacy of masks against the spread of COVID-19. Rather, it was a simple demonstration to show how masks lessened the spread of respiratory droplets, which can carry the disease. The British children’s television show “Operation Ouch!” also took a look at how much bacteria gets disseminated when a person coughs. While that episode did not include masks, it did compare a petri dish that was coughed on by a man with no mouth covering and a petri dish that was coughed on by a man who covered his mouth with an elbow. Here’s how the petri dish looked after it was coughed on by the man who covered his mouth (left) and the petri dish coughed on by the man who didn’t (right). As you can see, the results from “Operation Ouch!” are very similar to the results seen in Corley’s post:  Here’s the clip from “Operation Ouch!” (The cough experiment starts around the 50-second mark): A 2005 study published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology noted that more than 700 bacterial species have been detected in the oral cavity. Covering your mouth when you cough (either with an elbow or a mask) can reduce droplet transmission and lessen the spread of potentially harmful germs. Professor Lindsay Grayson, director of infectious diseases at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital, said as much during a presentation at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco in 2009 concerning research on the effectiveness of masks in slowing the spread of influenza. The New York Times reported: “If you’re wearing a mask to prevent yourself from catching it, they’re not so effective,” said Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne and one of the study’s co-authors. “But if you’re sick with the flu and coughing and sputtering, those masks do prevent you from spraying those bugs everywhere.” The researchers asked nine study subjects with documented cases of influenza type A or B to test two different types of masks — the standard, disposable surgical masks and a more costly, respirator-style mask. The flu patients coughed into a petri dish while wearing both types of mask as well as without the mask. The dish was then tested for the presence of flu virus. When either type of mask was worn, no virus was detected on the petri dish. But how effective are masks in preventing the spread of COVID-19? While the exact efficacy of masks on the spread of COVID-19 is still undetermined, health officials do recommend that people wear masks in public because these face coverings can prevent droplet transmission. Claim: A photograph shows one petri dish that was coughed on by a person not wearing a mask and another petri dish coughed on by the same person wearing a mask. 

SOLUTION: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told us:

PROBLEM: Paragraph: On 19 July 2017, the Finnish news web site Yle reported that a group of Finnish researchers had developed a vaccine for Type 1 diabetes, and that human trials were set to begin in 2018:  A vaccine for type 1 diabetes developed by Finnish researchers will be tested on mainly Finnish human subjects in late 2018, researchers announced on Tuesday. The scientists first found that the prototype works effectively and safely on mice, and now say that the vaccine could be in mainstream use within eight years if the coming rounds of tests prove successful. One skeptical reader asked us to check out the story. Yle is Finland’s public broadcasting corporation (akin to NPR or the BBC). T he names of the lead researchers and their universities are real, the announcement of vaccine trials is real, and the story is true. On 18 July 2017, the University of Tampere in Finland announced that Professor of Virology Heikki Hyöty and his team of researchers had identified a particular strand of enteroviruses (viruses transmitted through the intestines) linked to Type 1 diabetes, and developed a vaccine against them. “Already now it is known that the vaccine is effective and safe on mice,” Hyöty said. “The developing process has now taken a significant leap forward as the next phase is to study the vaccine in humans.” The university’s statement continued: In the first clinical phase, the vaccine will be studied in a small group of adults to ensure the safety of the vaccine. In the second phase, the vaccine will be studied in children and the aim is to investigate both the safety of the vaccine and its effectiveness against enteroviruses. In the third phase, the aim is to investigate whether the vaccine could be used to prevent the onset of Type 1 Diabetes. However, it can take about eight years in order to certainly know whether the vaccine prevents Type 1 Diabetes. Hyöty added that the vaccine would not cure existing cases of Type 1 diabetes, but that if it is successful, it would protect from other infections caused by enteroviruses including the common cold and meningitis. Another pioneer in this research, Professor Mikael Knip from the University of Helsinki, told Yle that the vaccine could have massive financial and public health benefits: It is estimated that the additional cost of care for one child with diabetes over their lifetime is about a million euros. This vaccine could prevent at least half of new cases, which amounts to some 250 million euros in annual savings. Claim: In July 2017, it was announced that Finnish researchers would begin human trials of a Type 1 diabetes vaccine in 2018.

SOLUTION:
The American biopharmaceutical company Provention Bio, which is based in Lebanon, New Jersey, is funding the continuation of Hyöty and Knip’s research, after reportedly receiving $28.4 million in financing, which it will disburse between the Type 1 diabetes vaccine trials and a second project.