mple enough. What happens though, if the money is not withdrawn before the year 2000? The computer will re-do the calculation exactly the same way. The money was in the bank from '95 to '00. That's '00 minus '95, which equals a negative 95 (-95). That's -95 years at 5% interest. That is a little bit more than $10,000, and because of the minus sign, it is going to subtract that amount from the account. The depositor now owes the bank $9,900. No industry is immune to this problem; it is a cross-platform problem. This is a problem that will affect personal computers, minicomputers, and mainframe computers. A system that is devised to cut an annual federal deficit to “0” by the year 2002 is already in "hot water." Data entered into the program will be miscalculated, resulting in inaccurate numbers as they "just won’t add up.” Public health information and surveillance at all levels of local, state, federal, and international public health, which are dependent upon dates for epidemiological (study of disease occurrence, location, and duration) and health statistics reasons, are also targets of Y2K. Since date of events, duration between events, and other calculations such as age of people are core epidemiological and health statistic requirements, this field may suffer great damage (Seligman). In addition to this, public health authorities are usually dependent upon the primary data providers such as physician practices, laboratories, hospitals, managed care organizations, and outpatient centers etc., as the source for original data upon which public health decisions are based. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for example, maintains over 100 public health surveillance systems all of which are dependent upon external sources of data (Issa). This basically means that it is not going to be sufficient to make the internal systems compliant to the year 2000 in order to address all of the details ...
