The Art of War. The principle is just as important when your enemy is a rapidly evolving virus that has claimed the lives of more than 4 million people worldwide.Traditionally, surveillance of infectious diseases by public bodies, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has focused on data such as case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths.More recently, however, rapid genome sequencing has allowed public health experts to survey variation between pathogens down to the level of their DNA or RNA bases, which are the chemical letters of the genetic code.However, according to population geneticists at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, some countries have neglected.