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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.
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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 .
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Wisconsin health officials are urging people to protect themselves as flu numbers spike across the state.

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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.
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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.

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Paragraph: File photo shows the silhouette of an elderly man. Reuters/File They said people who took drugs that block acetylcholine a chemical messenger in the nervous system critical for memory functioned less well than their peers. "These results were true even in older adults who have normal memory and thinking abilities," said Dr. Kaycee Sink of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina, who led the study of 3,000 people of whom 40 percent were taking more than one anticholinergic drug. "The effect is essentially that of a three- to four-year increase in age. So someone who is 75 in our study and taking at least one moderately anticholinergic medication is at a similar functional level to a 78 to 79-year-old," Sink said in an e-mail. Sink's findings, presented at American Geriatrics Society Meeting in Washington, add to a growing body of research that suggests these so-called anticholinergic medications can hasten functional and cognitive declines in elderly people. Some of the most common such drugs in the study included the blood pressure drug nifedipine (sold as Adalat or Procardia), the stomach antacid ranitidine or Zantac, both with mild or moderate anticholinergic properties, and Pfizer Inc's incontinence drug tolterodine or Detrol, which is highly anticholinergic. "The tricky part ... is that many useful drugs from many different classes of medications have anticholinergic properties," Sink said. She said in many cases newer drugs are available that do not have these effects and said doctors should look out for them for elderly patients. Dr. Jack Tsao, a neurologist with the U.S. Navy, reported last month at a American Academy of Neurology meeting that elderly people who took anticholinergic drugs had a 50 percent greater rate of memory decline than people in a long-term study who did not take the drugs. Sink studied the effects of taking multiple anticholinergic drugs on walking speed, basic activities such as dressing, eating, taking care of personal hygiene, grooming, and harder activities like shopping, cooking and managing money on her test subjects whose average age was 78. The researchers found that the more anticholinergic drugs people had in their systems, the worse their physical function, based on reports from people in the study and on independent measures of their performance. In a separate study this month in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Sink found that older nursing home residents who took drugs for dementia and incontinence at the same time had a 50 percent faster decline in function than those treated only for dementia. "I would encourage patients to bring in a list of everything they take (even over-the-counter medications) to their doctor and have them review it at least yearly," Sink said. "Physicians should try to decrease anticholinergic burden whenever possible." Claim: Common drugs hasten decline in elderly: study.
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Elderly people who took commonly prescribed drugs for incontinence, allergy or high blood pressure walked more slowly and were less able to take care of themselves than others not taking the drugs, U.S. researchers said on Saturday.