Businessweek: Real Disease, Virtual Help

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lower rates would help U. S -based multinationals compete against foreignbased multinationals—a good thing, since companies based in the U.S. are more likely to locate their high- end research, planning, and marketing jobs at home. Such a drop will also give corporations less incentive to base their global investment decisions on tax avoidance. In particular, opening up new operations in the U.S. would become more attractive. Reducing corporate taxes will help get the U. S. out of a game it cannot win. In a global economy, chasing profits across national borders is hopeless. When a product is designed in one country, manufactured in another, and sold in a third, it's hard to figure out where the profits are really being made. What quid pro quo should Obama extract in exchange for lowering the corporate tax rate ? One possibility: getting solid business support for other initiatives such as health-care reform. Cutting corporate taxes may mean some lost revenue, but the longterm budget benefit of getting a grip on health-care costs is far more important. Amore far-fetched trade-off would require companies to make their income tax returns public, at least in summary form. Companies now keep two different sets of books, one for investors and one for the tax authorities. Being able to see both sets would give us a better sense of what is going on in the global economy. The bottom line: At a time when jobs are disappearing by the millions, rais ing taxes on U.S.-based multinationals is not the right way to go. IBWI

A SMALL CONTRIBUTION CORPORATE INCOME TAX RECEIPTS AS A SHARE OF ALL FEDERAL RECEIPTS TEN-YEAR MOVING AVERAGE

Data: Bureau of Economic Analysis

BUSINESSWEEK I MAY 18,2009

REAL DISEASE, VIRTUAL HELP U.S. health officials are using digital tools to respond more quickly to swine flu and other potential epidemics

By Arik Hesseldahl

A day after news reports about an outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, health officials in Allegheny County, Pa., huddled to discuss contingency plans. How should they respond if the virus came to their part of the world? By closing schools? With widespread vaccinations ? To test different courses of action, they turned to computer scientists who had built a working model of the county. "It helps come up with recommendations of when and how to intervene," says Dr. Ron Voorhees, chief of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Allegheny County Health Dept. This is the first time Voorhees has had such technological support. A team at the University of Pittsburgh had built a virtual world, similar to Second Life or SimCity, with the county's 1.3 million residents represented by digital characters. It ran through 15 scenarios, with a variety of government reactions. Ultimately, the county avoided a serious outbreak, but Voorhees says it was well prepared. In recent years public-health officials have turned to computer scientists for aid in fighting a variety of infectious diseases. Techies help harness the growing amount of data people create each day, through Google searches, cell-phone calls, and the like, so of-

ficials can detect potential problems faster than before. Google, for example, tracks the number of searches for "flu" and related terms and reports the results to the government. IBM donated to researchers and governments, including Mexico, a program it created that can simulate the outbreak of a pandemic flu in more than 100 cities. At the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, an assistant professor of medicine, works on the effort with virtual worlds. His team plugs in real data—infections and deaths in different regions, say—and then crafts simulations. It uses Census Bureau data to create a digital representative of each person in the U.S., with details down to a person's age, location, and job. Lee works under the auspices of a National Institutes of Health project called Midas, short for Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study. The biggest decision for health officials, says Lee, is when to close schools and offices because that causes "a significant economic burden." In any case, when virtual workplaces and schools are closed, digital citizens don't necessarily stay home. Some still go for walks or to the mall, where they might catch or pass on a virus, just like in the real world. "Not even [virtual people] will all do what they're told," says Lee. 1BW1