The Department of Health and Human Services is launching what it calls a "sweeping plan" to combat Lyme disease, on top of the nearly $50 million the National Institutes of Health spends each year on researching the disease and $122 million in "broader tick-borne disease research."

Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced "one of the most ambitious federal efforts ever to combat Lyme disease" at a press conference in New Hampshire, a state plagued by the disease. 

HHS said nearly half a million Americans are diagnosed with the condition every year and "emergency room visits for tick bites reached their highest springtime level in nearly a decade."

A multimilion-dollar pilot led by HHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will collaborate with tick-control researchers, starting with the New England Center of Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases and building on existing collaboration with the Indian Health Service and the Wampanoag Tribe in Massachusetts, to reduce tick populations and disrupt breeding cycles.

NIH is talking to "private-sector innovators" about developing and funding clinical research on products that can stop patients from developing Alpha-gal syndrome, which can trigger "potentially serious allergic reactions to red meat and other mammalian products" after tick bites and is estimated to afflict 500,000 people a year.

HHS is also offering another $2.5 million in "LymeX innovation challenges" to support "educational tools and public awareness campaigns [...] novel uses of existing medicines and drug repurposing strategies" and AI-driven research to help patients with Lyme and "other invisible illnesses" get faster answers and care.

It builds on the first-term Trump administration's LymeX Innovation Accelerator, a collaboration with the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation.