Variant in headlines
A new name is a surveillance event. It is not automatically a worse disease.
WHO Greek-letter names and CDC classes (VOC, VOI) were communication tools. They are not a ranking of evil.
This atlas will not teach you to build a variant. It will teach you why names appear on dashboards.
Local notes
Greek letters
Alpha and Delta were public handles. Scientific lineage names (Pango) sit underneath.
Public-health desks
English already had flu strain talk. COVID made the vocabulary louder, not brand new.
Official pages own schedules and treatment. This atlas does not.
More in Change & defence
Antibiotic resistance
A shared drug budget under selection in hospitals, farms and wastewater — stewardship, not a lab manual.
Familiarity 85Vaccines and immunity
Antibodies, memory cells and community arithmetic — conceptual, not a prescription and not an anti-vaccine tract.
Familiarity 94Biofilms
Surface cities of microbes — plaque and catheters explain persistence, without a grow-your-own kit.
Familiarity 38Hygiene and balance
Clean water saves lives; missing old microbial partners is a separate, still-debated immune story.
Familiarity 70Horizontal gene transfer
Sideways DNA traffic — conjugation, transduction, transformation as names and history, not protocols.
Familiarity 45