What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

Opinion:
MEANEY v. UNITED STATES.
No. 30.
Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit
June 10, 1940.
Edmund Clynes, of Rochester, N. Y., for appellant.
Thomas E. Walsh, of Washington, D. C., for appellee.
Before L. HAND, CHASE, and PATTERSON, Circuit Judges.
L. HAND, Circuit Judge.
This is an appeal from a.judgment entered upon the verdict of a jury, dismissing a petition in an action to recover upon a policy of war risk insurance. The insured rvas mustered out on December 31, 1918, and the policy lapsed on January 30, 1919; he died of pulmonary tuberculosis on July 6, 1922, and the question was whether he was permanently and totally disabled when the policy lapsed. He had consulted one physician at some time, not definitely fixed, in 1919, and another in December, 1920, who found that he had contracted tuberculosis, and that it was already “moderately advanced”. By April of 1921 the disease had so far developed that he had to go to a sanatorium, where lie stayed 1 ill January, 1922, only six months before his death. The only error we need consider was a ruling, made during the examination of the physician who had first examined him in December, 1920. This witness said that he had taken care of the insured both at that time and after he came back from the sanatorium; and he was allowed to testify as to what he found on his several examinations, hut the judge refused to let him say what the insured had told him of the “history of the case”. It is true that the plaintiff did not make any formal offer of proof such as Rule 43(c), Rules of Civil Procedure, provides for, but, while that would have been useful, it was not an absolute condition upon availing himself of the error. Moreover, he did almost the equivalent when he said that the “history” excluded was the “crux of the whole case” and that if it could not be obtained from the physician, it could not be obtained at all. The first physician who had examined him was dead, and the insured’s declarations as to the time of the onset of his disease and its immediate severity were quite likely to be determinative. If the testimony was competent, its exclusion probably affected “the substantial rights of the parties”. Rule 61.
The insured’s declarations seem to have been offered as a narrative of his past condition; so far as appears they were no part of the basis of the physician’s opinion as to his condition; at least they were not offered as such. They were therefore hearsay, and moreover, they did not fall within the generally accepted exception in favor of spontaneous expressions of pain or the like. It is quite true that this exception includes narrative statements as well as mere ejaculations, and that it has been extended to a declaration of present symptoms told by a patient to a physician. Northern Pacific R. R. v. Urlin, 158 U.S. 271, 274, 15 S.Ct. 840, 39 L.Ed. 977; Boston & Albany R. Co. v. O’Reilly, 158 U.S. 334, 337, 15 S.Ct. 830, 39 L.Ed. 1006; Delaware L. & W. R. Co. v. Roalefs, 3 Cir., 70 F. 21 (semble); Chicago Railways Co. v. Kramer, 6 Cir., 234 F. 245, 251; London G. & A. Co. v. Woelfle, 8 Cir., 83 F.2d 325, 335 (semble); Hartford A. & I. Co. v. Baugh, 5 Cir., 87 F.2d 240, 241, 242; Davidson v. Cornell, 132 N.Y. 228, 237, 238, 30 N.E. 573. The utterances of a patient in the course of his examination, so far as they are spontaneous, may be merely ejaculatory — as when he emits a cry upon palpation — or they may he truly narrative; and it will often be impossible to distinguish rationally between the two; between an inarticulate cry, for example, and a statement such as: “That hurts”. The warrant for the admission of both is the same; the lack of opportunity or motive for fabrication upon an unexpected occasion to which the declarant responds immediately, and without reflection. But most of what he tells will not ordinarily he of this kind at all; there may be, and there is in fact, good reason to receive it, hut it is a very different reason. A man goes to his physician expecting to recount all that he feels, and often he has with some care searched his consciousness to be sure that he will leave out nothing. If his narrative of present symptoms is to be received as evidence of the facts, as distinguished from mere support for the physician’s opinion, these parts of it can only rest upon his motive to disclose the truth because his treatment will in part depend upon what he says. That justification is not necessary in the case of his spontaneous declarations, even when they are narrative; but it is necessary for those we are now considering. This, as we understand it, is the doctrine of Barber v. Merriam, 11 Allen, Mass., 322.
The same reasoning applies with exactly the same force to a narrative of past symptoms, and so the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, declared obiter in Roosa v. Boston Loan Co., 132 Mass. 439. A patient has an equal motive to speak the truth; what he has felt in the past is as apt to be important in his treatment as what he feels at the moment. Thus, in spite of the dicta in Northern Pacific R. R. v. Urlin, supra (158 U.S. 271, 15 S.Ct. 840, 39 L.Ed. 977) and Boston & Albany R. R. v. O’Reilly, supra (158 U.S. 334, 15 S.Ct. 830, 39 L.Ed. 1006) that only declarations of present symptoms are competent, several federal courts have seemed not to take the distinction between declarations of present and past symptoms, provided the patient is consulting the physician for treatment, and Professor Wigmore appears to assent. Wigmore § 1722. United States v. Tyrakowski; 7 Cir., 50 F.2d 766, 771; United States v. Nickle, 8 Cir., 60 F.2d 372, 374; United States v. Roberts, 10 Cir., 62 F.2d 594, 596; United States v. Calvey, 3 Cir., 110 F.2d 327, 330. This situation is quite different from United States v. Balance, 61 App.D.C. 226, 59 F.2d 1040 where the declarations were made by a veteran to physicians of the Veterans’ Administration; and it is obviously different from declarations of facts irrelevant to the declarant’s treatment, such as what was the cause of his injury. It is true that this body of authority is not impressive as such, but it appears to us that if there is to be any consistency in doctrine, either declarations of all symptoms, present or past, should be competent, or only those which fall within the exception for spontaneous utterances. Nobody would choose the second, particularly as the substance of the declarations can usually be got before the jury as parts-of the basis on which the physician’s opinion was formed. It is indeed always possible that a patient may not really consult his physician for treatment; the consultation may be colorable. The judge has power to prevent an abuse in such cases, and here as elsewhere, when the competency of evidence depends upon a question, of fact, his conclusion is final. He must decide before admitting the declarations, whether the patient was consulting the physician for treatment and for that alone. Unless he is so satisfied, he must exclude them, though it is true that if he admits them, the defendant may still argue that they are untrustworthy. They will be evidence, but in estimating their truth the jury may have to decide for themselves the very issue on which the judge himself passed before he admitted them; the competency of evidence is always independent of its weight.
We hold that the insured’s “history of the case” as narrated to the physician was competent and that its exclusion was error.
Judgment reversed; new trial ordered.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 0