TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: The study to be published on Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience differs from many other pot-related research projects that are focused on chronic, heavy users of cannabis. The collaborative effort between Northwestern University’s medical school, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School showed a direct correlation between the number of times users smoked and abnormalities in the brain. “What we’re seeing is changes in people who are 18 to 25 in core brain regions that you never, ever want to fool around with,” said co-senior study author Dr. Hans Beiter, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University. In particular, the study identified changes to the nucleus accumbens and the nucleus amygdala, regions of the brain that are key to regulating emotion and motivation, in marijuana users who smoke between one and seven joints a week. The researchers found changes to the volume, shape and density of those brain regions. But more studies are needed to determine how those changes may have long-term consequences and whether they can be fixed with abstinence, Beiter said. “Our hypothesis from this early work is that these changes may be an early sign of what later becomes amotivation, where people aren’t focused on their goals,” he said. The study, which was funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, comes as access to pot is expanding following 2012 votes in Washington state and Colorado to legalize its recreational use. The drug remains illegal under federal law. Medical pot is allowed in 20 U.S. states. Pot legalization advocates make the argument that marijuana is safer than alcohol a central part of their campaigns. Other research has found drinking alcohol alters the brain, Beiter said. But while researchers do not know exactly how the mental rewiring seen in pot users affects their lives, the study shows it physically changes the brain in ways that differ from drinking, he said. This latest study fits with other research showing marijuana use has significant effects on young people because their brains are still developing, and Beiter said he has become convinced that marijuana should only be used by people under 30 if they need it to manage pain from a terminal illness.

SOLUTION: Casual pot use causes brain abnormalities in the young: study.

PROBLEM: Peebles, a 30-year-old black man who’s skeptical of what he hears from the news media and government, initially didn’t see the need for alarm over the virus. “I felt it was a complete hoax,” Peebles said. “This thing happens every two or four years. We have an outbreak of a disease that seems to put everybody in a panic.” Peebles is among roughly 40 million black Americans deciding minute by minute whether to put their faith in government and the medical community during the coronavirus pandemic. Historic failures in government responses to disasters and emergencies, medical abuse, neglect and exploitation have jaded generations of black people into a distrust of public institutions. “I’ve just been conditioned not to trust,” said Peebles, who is now obeying the state’s stay home order and keeping his distance from others when he goes out. Some call such skepticism the “Tuskegee effect” — distrust linked to the U.S. government’s once-secret study of black men in Alabama who were left untreated for syphilis. Black people already suffer disproportionately from chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease and are far more likely to be uninsured. How the government and medical community responds to the crisis will be especially crucial for outcomes among black Americans, civil rights advocates and medical experts say. “We are right to be paranoid and to ask tough questions,” said U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts who joined other congressional leaders in asking the government to collect and release information about the race and ethnicity of people who are tested or treated for the virus that causes COVID-19. “History has shown us, when we do not” ask questions, said Pressley, who is black, “the consequences are grave, and in fact life and death.”  NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who hosted a coronavirus tele-town hall with U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams last month, said black and brown communities need reliable information about the crisis. “Now that this has been deemed a pandemic, I am most concerned with inequities in who’s provided tests, who’s provided treatment and how those tests and the treatments are administered, in a way that is open, transparent, and equitable,” Johnson said. For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. But for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death. Cities with large black populations like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and New Orleans have emerged as hot spots for the coronavirus. Figures released by Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services show 40% of those who have died from COVID-19 are black in a state where African-Americans are just 14% of the population. And many Southern states with large black populations have been slow to mandate statewide restrictions shown to slow virus spread. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, black adults are 60% more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to be diagnosed with diabetes, 40% more likely to have high blood pressure and are less likely to have those conditions under control. Additionally, in 2015, black women were 20% more likely to have asthma than non-Hispanic whites. Those disparities make the availability of a treatment or vaccine urgent, even as the virus is currently projected to claim tens of thousands of lives. But given history, Peebles said he wouldn’t rush to accept a remedy. “If we got to a place where the government says, ‘OK, now it’s time to take a vaccine,’ then I’m definitely going to be skeptical of their intentions,” he said. Launched in 1932 by the U.S. Public Health Service, the Tuskegee study involved roughly 600 poor black men in Alabama who weren’t treated for the sexually transmitted disease so researchers could track its progress. The program was exposed and ended in 1972, and then-President Bill Clinton formally apologized in 1997. The Tuskegee legacy has helped pollute the black community’s relationship with American medical science. A 2016 paper found the fallout included mistrust of medicine among black men, along with fewer interactions with doctors and higher mortality rates. In Tuskegee, where many families include descendants of victims, many residents don’t trust government health information, said Lucenia Dunn, a former Tuskegee mayor. So volunteers trying to get the word out about coronavirus have gone door-to-door distributing fliers with cartoon-like illustrations that don’t look “too official,” she said. “We have a general distrust in this community,’” Dunn said. “I call it ‘subconscious rejection.’ The attitude is, ‘I’m going to rebel against this. You people have been telling us lies for years. Why should I believe you now?’” In Los Angeles, Jahmil Lacey helped found a public health group for black men and boys, TRAPMedicine, that educates black barbers and organizes workshops to address health disparities among their customers. “People will quote the Tuskegee experiment as the reason why black people don’t trust health care, but there’s so much more than just that one example,” Lacey said. “We don’t trust systems that are connected to white supremacy. So, we have to do the work to repair it.” Indeed, Tuskegee didn’t happen in a vacuum. In the 1950s, doctors at the John Hopkins Hospital used cervical cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks, a black mother of five, to pioneer medical advances and research that continue globally today. Lacks, who died in 1951, never gave her consent and her family has never been compensated. One way to begin healing the mistrust is to increase black representation in the medical field, said Dr. Nicollette Louissaint, executive director of the Washington-based emergency response advocacy group Healthcare Ready. “We have to make sure that ... the message itself and the messengers are being adapted to the appropriate audience,” said Louissaint, who is black. “It’s going to be really important that we get that right.” ___ Reeves reported from Birmingham, Alabama. Both are members of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow Morrison on Twitter at http://twitter.com/aaronlmorrison. Follow Reeves on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Jay_Reeves

SOLUTION: Amid coronavirus pandemic, black mistrust of medicine looms.

PROBLEM: Surging deaths in New York City and New Orleans showed that a wave of lethal coronavirus infections expected to overwhelm hospitals, even in relatively affluent, urban areas with extensive healthcare systems, has begun to crash down on the United States. Governors, mayors and physicians have voiced alarm for weeks over crippling scarcities of personal protective gear for first-responders and front-line healthcare workers, as well as ventilators and other medical supplies. With the federal government’s national strategic stockpile of such equipment nearly depleted, states have been forced essentially to compete against each other on the open market for vital resources. Cities across the country have also scrambled to expand hospital capacity and recruit healthcare professionals out of retirement to meet looming shortages of sick beds and personnel. New York City, the pandemic’s U.S. epicenter, has mere days to prepare for the worst of the outbreak, said Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose city has suffered more than a quarter of the 7,000-plus coronavirus deaths to date nationwide. New York is in an “extraordinary race against time,” de Blasio told a news briefing on Friday, renewing his call for the federal government to mobilize the U.S. military. “We’re dealing with an enemy that is killing thousands of Americans, and a lot of people are dying who don’t need to die,” he said. “You can’t say, every state for themselves, every city for themselves. That is not America.”  Americans, almost all of them under orders to stay home except for essential outings such as grocery shopping or seeing a doctor, have heard conflicting guidance in recent days about the need for wearing face masks in public. At the White House on Friday, President Donald Trump seemed to muddy the waters further when he announced that federal health authorities are now recommending individuals wear cloth face coverings to stem transmission of the virus. But he stressed the advisory was purely voluntary, and that he would not be heeding the recommendation himself. “With the masks, it’s going to be a really voluntary thing. You can do it, you don’t have to do it. I’m choosing not to do it,” he said. Doctors and nurses, many lacking adequate supplies of medical-grade face masks and other protective gear, were already confronting an onslaught from COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the highly contagious coronavirus. One physician at a New York City hospital recounted arriving at work on Friday to learn that three of his COVID-19 patients had died that morning. A few hours later, he had intubated two others. “I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never even heard of something like this in the developed world,” he told Reuters on condition of anonymity, because he was not authorized to speak with the media. Another hot spot, Louisiana, reported a sharp jump in deaths, climbing 20% to 370 on Friday, marking the highest day-to-day increase in fatal cases yet for the Gulf Coast state. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards pleaded for residents to abide by his state-at-home order as the number of infections statewide surpassed 10,000. “For those of you who are not taking the crisis seriously, I am asking you to do a better job,” he told a news conference. Louisiana’s largest city, New Orleans, where Mardi Gras celebrations in late February are believed to have spread the virus before social distancing orders were imposed, has become a focal point of the crisis. The outbreak there has proven far more lethal than elsewhere in the United States, with a per-capita death rate twice that of New York City. Doctors, public health officials and available data suggest the Big Easy’s high levels of obesity and related ailments may be part of the problem. In New York, the U.S. state hardest hit by the coronavirus in sheer numbers of infections and lives lost, the cumulative number of fatalities rose above 2,900 - on par with the death toll from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. “Personally, it’s hard to go through this all day, and then it’s hard to stay up all night watching those numbers come in,” Governor Andrew Cuomo said. New York City alone accounted for more than a quarter of the 7,077 U.S. coronavirus deaths tallied by Johns Hopkins University on Friday. Known U.S. infections, approaching 275,000 cases, made up about 25% of the more than 1 million cases reported worldwide. Many of the most gravely ill patients were dying alone as medical staff forbade relatives to be with them in their final hours for fear of a further spread of infection. Dr. Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at New York’s Columbia University Medical Center, described the scene inside tents set up outside hospitals to help contain an increasing influx of patients. “In those same tents, I saw too much pain, loneliness, and death. People dying alone,” he wrote on Twitter on Thursday night. In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy ordered all flags lowered to half-staff for as long as the emergency lasts, saying his state was the first to take such a measure. Fresh data on Friday highlighted the economic consequences of the public health crisis, confirming that hundreds of thousands of Americans had lost their jobs due to the pandemic. Economists said actual job losses will prove far greater but had yet to be reflected in employment figures as much of the economy had only begun to shut down last month.

SOLUTION:
New York in 'race against time' as Trump stresses face masks are voluntary.