instruction:
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.
question:
Paragraph: The Department of Health Services reported Friday that Wisconsin has seen 459 hospitalizations and 11 deaths due to flu complications this season. The number of hospitalizations is three times higher than last year at this time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has elevated Wisconsin to its high flu category. South-central and southwestern Wisconsin have been hardest hit. And physicians said it could get worse before it gets better. “The best thought is that we are still going to be seeing it rise before we see it fall. Generally, the flu season lasts anywhere between four and 12 weeks, with eight kind of being the average,” said Dr. Joseph McBride, an infectious disease specialist at UW Health in Madison. “I would imagine we are going to remain pretty high throughout January, but we’ll see.”   In Milwaukee: 131 people have been hospitalized with the flu compared with 17 at this time last season. “We know that it’s hitting some families pretty hard,” Aurora Health Care pediatrician Dr. Kevin Dahlman said. State Health Officer Jeanne Ayers urged anyone who has not had an annual flu shot to get one. Claim: Flu hospitalizations spike across Wisconsin with 11 deaths .
answer:
Wisconsin health officials are urging people to protect themselves as flu numbers spike across the state.


question:
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.
answer:
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.


question:
Paragraph: Although the story mentions the high upfront cost of proton therapy, it does not describe the cost of treatment compared to other alternatives. The story points out that there have been no controlled treatment trials for proton therapy in prostate cancer–increasingly the targeted use–so there really are no good data on benefits. Since the technology is relatively new there are probably no good long-term survival estimates even from case series. The story mentions side effects of proton therapy, such as incontinence and sexual side effects in men with prostate cancer, and explains that they may be more common than reported in studies. The story mentions that there is a lack of randomized trials comparing proton therapy to conventional radiation. The story does not appear to engage in disease mongering. However, the article doesn’t indicate that many of the 186,320 new prostate cancer cases are early-stage for which the benefit of any treatment–let alone proton beam–remains uncertain. The story quotes multiple experts who provide meaningful perspectives on the value of proton therapy. The story mentions conventional radiation and surgery as the alternatives to proton therapy. The story accurately describes the limited availability of proton therapy. The story accurately describes the novelty of proton therapy. Because the story quotes multiple experts, the reader can assume that the story does not rely on a press release as the sole source of information. Claim: The promise of proton-beam therapy
answer:

This story reports on the hype, the promise and the controversies around proton beam therapy. The potential benefit of proton beam therapy is that it can accurately target deep-seated cancers without damaging surrounding tissues. For this reason it is an attractive idea for certain rare and serious tumors such as tumors of the brain or eye where surgery or conventional radiation would be very destructive. However, it is increasingly being used to treat more common cancers, such as prostate and lung cancer. Moreover, proton beam therapy is extraordinarily costly because the equipment involved requires huge investments from hospitals. Given the current economic climate in healthcare, the acceleration of this technology has raised serious questions about its cost-effectiveness and issues around access to care, given that it is currently only available in academic medical centers. This story does a good job of describing the problem of limited availability to those patients who could truly benefit from proton therapy while at the same time it is increasingly being used in cancers for which there is questionable benefit, especially prostate cancer. The story also rightly points out the limited evidence that it is any better than conventional radiation and that the low risk of side effects may be an underestimation. The story also highlights the perverse incentives to use the therapy to treat prostate cancer so that hospitals can recover their high costs of investing in the technology. However, the story could have more explicitly compared the cost of proton beam radiation to conventional radiation to give the reader a sense of the scope of the cost difference. Overall, this was a very enlightening in-depth piece about a growing concern in health care.