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:
Irwin D. BROSS, Appellant, v. Thomas K. TURNAGE, as Administrator of Veterans Affairs for the United States Veterans Administration; the Veterans Advisory Committee on Environmental Hazards; the Scientific Council of the Veterans Advisory Committee on Environmental Hazards; and the United States Veterans Administration, Appellees.
No. 235, Docket 89-7531.
United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.
Argued/Submitted Oct. 26, 1989.
Decided Nov. 17, 1989.
Lewis Steele, Albany, N.Y., for appellant.
Dennis C. Vacco, U.S. Atty. W.D. New York (Martin J. Littlefield, of counsel), for appellees.
Before OAKES, Chief Judge, KEARSE and ALTIMARI, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM:
Irwin D. Bross appeals from a judgment of the United States District Court for the Western District of New York, John T. Curtin, Judge, dismissing his complaint pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6). We affirm.
The Veterans’ Dioxin and Radiation Exposure Compensation Standards Act (“the Act”), 38 U.S.C. § 354, note (Supp. V 1987), requires the Administrator of Veterans’ Affairs (“the Administrator”) to establish guidelines for resolving claims involving exposure by service personnel to dioxin or ionizing radiation. See id. § 5(a)(1). Under the Act, the Administrator, after receiving the advice of the Scientific Council (“Scientific Council”) of the Veterans’ Advisory Committee on Environmental Hazards (“the Advisory Committee”), is to evaluate findings of scientific studies relating to risks of exposure. See id. § 5(b)(1)(B). The Act sets forth additional provisions pertaining to procedures for prescribing regulations based upon such scientific evidence, see id. § 5(b)(2)-(3) & (c), and to the composition of the Advisory Committee. See id. § 6.
The plaintiff, Irwin Bross, has written a number of papers on the link between ionizing radiation and cancer. Dr. Bross’s studies essentially have argued that there is a much stronger causal connection between ionizing radiation and cancer than what the Veterans’ Administration (“VA”) currently recognizes. Dr. Bross has submitted his studies to both the VA and the Advisory Committee for review. Dr. Bross claims that the VA’s and Advisory Committee’s evaluations of his studies have not complied with the substantive and procedural commands of the Act.
On September 4, 1987, Dr. Bross filed a complaint with the United States District Court for the Western District of New York against the Administrator, the VA, the Advisory Committee, and the Scientific Council. He alleged, first, that the VA and the Administrator unlawfully failed to publish evaluations of his reports; second, that the defendants failed to consider fairly his conclusions; third, that the processes employed by the defendants violated his due process rights; and, fourth, that the defendants’ conclusions that Dr. Bross’s studies provided no basis for altering current VA policy were arbitrary and capricious. On March 29, 1989, the district court dismissed the complaint, holding, among other things, that Dr. Bross did not have proper standing to bring his claims.
We hold that the district court properly dismissed Dr. Bross’s complaint. In pursuing statutory claims for violations of the Act, Dr. Bross alleges that his right to sue stems from the Administrative Procedure Act, which grants the right of judicial review to “[a] person ... aggrieved by agency action within the meaning of a relevant statute.” 5 U.S.C. § 702 (1988). A person suing under § 702 must show that the interests he asserts are “arguably within the zone of interests to be protected or regulated by the statute or constitutional guarantee in question.” Association of Data Processing Service Orgs., Inc. v. Camp, 397 U.S. 150, 153, 90 S.Ct. 827, 829, 25 L.Ed.2d 184 (1970). Judicial review of an agency action will not lie “if the plaintiff’s interests are so marginally related to or inconsistent with the purposes implicit in the statute that it cannot reasonably be assumed that Congress intended to permit the suit.” Clarke v. Securities Indus. Ass’n, 479 U.S. 388, 399, 107 S.Ct. 750, 757, 93 L.Ed.2d 757 (1987).
We find that the interest asserted by Dr. Bross is not within the zone of interests protected by the Act. Because the Act is chiefly centered around the procedures for awarding VA compensation, a veteran aggrieved by the VA’s refusal to consider scientific evidence potentially relevant to a claim for benefits conceivably could have a right to seek judicial review. However, the interest of a scientist like Dr. Bross in seeking professional and governmental recognition of his views, although unquestionably genuine, is not reasonably connected to the awarding of VA benefits to fall within the Act’s zone of interests. Accordingly, we rule that the district court correctly dismissed Dr. Bross’s statutory claims.
Additionally, we hold that the district court properly dismissed Dr. Bross’s due process claim. It is fundamental that to establish a procedural due process violation, a plaintiff must show a deprivation of a protected life, liberty or property interest. See, e.g., Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 570-72, 92 S.Ct. 2701, 2705-06, 33 L.Ed.2d 548 (1972). Dr. Bross has not identified a protected entitlement, nor is one readily discernible from his complaint.
Judgment affirmed.
. Dr. Bross’s complaint sets forth six separate claims for relief. Two of them are requests for mandamus and thus refer to the remedies sought rather than constituting separate claims for relief.

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