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.

Input: Consider Input: 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.

Output: The U.S. winter flu season is off to its earliest start in more than 15 years.


Input: Consider Input: Paragraph: The trial results on patients with a gene anomaly known as NTRK fusion, which occurs in less than 1 percent across a range of tumor types, were presented at the annual congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Munich on Sunday. Germany’s Bayer and U.S. partner Loxo, in turn, released data for their rival compound larotrectinib, which slightly improved on previous high-efficacy readings in an enlarged trial. Traditionally, oncologists have made treatment decisions based on where in the body a tumor started, increasingly helped by the growing knowledge of cancer’s complex genetic drivers. Under the tumor-agnostic approach, also known as pan-tumor, drugmakers skip the organ-of-origin perspective and regroup patients based only on signature genetic mutations, but success in real life will depend on the fast spread of comprehensive gene-sequencing tools for tissue samples. Individually, the mutations are so rare that cancer units are seen as unlikely to run dedicated tests for each. Roche’s Foundation Medicine supplies the comprehensive kits, competing with Thermo Fisher Scientific and Caris Life Sciences. “It’s one of the reasons we acquired Foundation Medicine, to make this comprehensive genomic profiling routine and upfront in the course of the disease,” said Daniel O’Day, the head of Roche’s Pharmaceuticals division. Loxo’s larotrectinib pill, co-developed with Bayer, was last year shown to shrink tumors in 75 percent of patients with the NTRK fusion gene anomaly, occurring in the lung, pancreas, or more than a dozen other organs. On Sunday, the response rate to larotrectinib within an enlarged group of 122 trial participants - up from 55 initially and now spanning 24 tumor types - was shown to be 81 percent. Roche said the readings from the two NTRK fusion trials were not comparable because they are made up of different patient types. Loxo’s study, for instance, included some cancers in children, while Roche plans to investigate those separately. The Roche compound is designed to tackle several oncogenic mutations and last month, it unveiled data here on entrectinib pushing back tumors in 77 percent of lung cancer patients with a mutation called ROS1. Merck & Co’s Keytruda in May last year became the first drug to win approval for pan-tumor use, though that remains a relatively small market for the mega-selling drug. Bayer and Loxo are testing a second pan-tumor drug, LOXO-195. Roche Pharmaceutical’s O’Day welcomed a wider field. “Both things have to happen: You need genomic profiling and you need enough targeted medicines to encourage physicians to make that diagnosis upfront very complete. This is the world we’re entering,” he said. Though response rates could encourage a race for more such drugs, the need for suitable gene mutations or fusions will be a tall order, said oncologist Ulrik Lassen of Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet, who co-authored the larotrectinib study. “You need to screen a lot of patients to find the needle in the haystack and the method is complicated, costly and time-consuming. When we get better at using these technologies, we can find more oncogenic fusions and companies will be smart enough to find the agents that target them.”  Roche acquired entrectinib as part of its takeover deal with U.S. cancer drug specialist Ignyta Inc for $1.7 billion, agreed in December last year. Immuno-oncology remains another major business area for Roche, which also released positive results on using its Tecentriq drug in a group of breast cancer patients with a particularly poor prognosis. Claim: Roche takes on Loxo, Bayer in gene-defined cancer class.

Output: Roche’s entrectinib cancer pill was shown to shrink tumors in 57 percent of patients within a group that can only be identified via genetic profiling, as the Swiss drugmaker challenges an alliance of Bayer and Loxo Oncology in a new targeted treatment area.


Input: Consider Input: Paragraph: Jean-Claude Shako suffered head and other injuries in the June 25, 2018, collision while he and four other immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo were headed to work at a meatpacking plant in Tama. The collision with a construction vehicle also injured both drivers and a fifth person in the car carrying Shako, according to The Gazette. Shako’s severe brain trauma has impaired his mobility, speech and memory. He’s well enough to be discharged from the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics, doctors have said, but he has no family to move in with, no money for a rehabilitation center and isn’t yet eligible for assistance through Medicaid. “I’m getting stronger,” Shako told the newspaper through an interpreter last week. “If my family would take me, I would go. But I don’t have family here.” He has been granted permanent U.S. residency. He carries in his wallet pictures of his wife and five children, who remain in Congo. Hospital officials cite privacy rules in declining to answer questions about Shako and about why the hospital hadn’t subsidized a move to a lower-cost skilled nursing facility. In fiscal 2018, the hospital provided free care for 14,548 patients and absorbing costs of $14.2 million, according to Iowa Hospital Association figures. Shako’s friend and co-legal guardian Peter Nkumu, of Iowa City, has been scrambling to find help for him, including asking lawmakers to consider waiving a wait rule for legal immigrants wanting access to Medicaid. State Sen. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, an Ottumwa Republican, said she plans to inquire about Shako’s case and said lawmakers might be willing — in extreme circumstances — to consider exceptions to the five-year wait rule. But Miller-Meeks also said she wants to make sure other avenues and options are considered, such as stringent insurance requirements for legal immigrants. Nkumu and other immigrants have explored trying to bring someone from Congo to support Shako, but visas are tough to come by. Shako received one of 2,664 permanent visas issued to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2017, according to the U.S. State Department. They fear sending Shako back to Congo, saying the poor conditions there could be prove fatal to him. Geoffrey Lauer, executive director of the Iowa Brain Injury Alliance based in Iowa City, said getting Shako out of the hospital and into a more appropriate setting not only would save state resources, it could accelerate his rehabilitation. And, Lauer said, Shako now is an Iowan, making him “part of our mission.” Claim: Immigrant still hospitalized in Iowa, 18 months after crash.


Output: An African man who was trying to build a new life in Cedar Rapids has spent the past 18 months at an Iowa City hospital, recovering from a traffic accident that killed two fellow immigrants.