Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. traveled to Concord on Thursday for a press conference and closed-door roundtable with New Hampshire lawmakers, using the visit to announce what the Trump administration is calling one of the most ambitious federal efforts ever mounted against Lyme disease. New Hampshire, consistently among the states hardest hit by tick-borne illness, was the deliberate backdrop for a package of initiatives that includes a multi-million-dollar tick control pilot program, three new innovation prize challenges totaling up to $2.5 million, new Alpha-gal syndrome research partnerships, and expanded access to providers for people with chronic Lyme disease symptoms.
According to the HHS press release issued Thursday, Kennedy convened the roundtable as part of his “Take Back Your Health” tour. The choice of New Hampshire was not incidental: the state sits at the epicenter of the Lyme disease crisis in the Northeast, where the combination of expanding white-tailed deer populations, milder winters, and dense woodland recreation habitat has turned tick-borne illness into an increasingly serious year-round concern.
“Millions of Americans battling Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses have spent years searching for answers, treatment, and support,” Kennedy said in prepared remarks. “Today, the Trump Administration is launching one of the most ambitious federal efforts ever to combat Lyme disease by accelerating research, expanding innovation, and improving care for patients and families. We are going after this disease at its source, driving faster diagnostics and new prevention strategies, and delivering the urgency and action Americans deserve.”
The Scale of the Problem in New Hampshire and Beyond
The numbers behind Thursday’s announcement are significant. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 476,000 Americans are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year. Emergency room visits for tick bites recently reached their highest springtime level in nearly a decade, suggesting the problem is not plateauing. In neighboring Vermont, state health officials recorded more than 2,200 probable Lyme disease cases last year, described as the highest total yet. An estimated 56 percent of adult ticks in Vermont carry the bacteria that causes Lyme, a figure that reflects the broader regional pattern extending across New England.
New Hampshire shares that exposure. The state’s combination of forested hiking trails, residential properties abutting woodlands, and a strong outdoor recreation culture puts a large portion of the population in regular tick habitat. For residents who spend time in the state’s forests, fields, or even suburban backyards during warmer months, the risk is not theoretical. Lyme disease, if caught and treated early, responds well to antibiotics. Left undiagnosed, it can cause persistent neurological, cardiac, and joint problems that are significantly harder to treat and sometimes debilitating over years.
NIH currently invests nearly $50 million annually in Lyme disease research and approximately $122 million in broader tick-borne disease research, Kennedy noted. Thursday’s announcement adds new layers on top of that baseline funding.
Tick Control at the Source
The most distinctive piece of Thursday’s announcement was a new multi-million-dollar pilot program targeting ticks on wildlife before they can transmit disease to humans. The CDC will lead the effort in collaboration with HHS and researchers at the New England Center of Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases. The initiative will develop and deploy practical strategies to target and eliminate ticks at wildlife population level, disrupting the breeding cycle before infected ticks can spread to domestic animals or people.
The collaboration will include the Indian Health Service and the Wampanoag Tribe in Massachusetts, extending the reach of the effort to communities that often experience disproportionate exposure to tick habitat. By reducing tick populations and disrupting breeding cycles at scale, the program aims to slow disease transmission broadly rather than relying entirely on individual protective behavior.
This approach represents a shift in emphasis. Lyme disease prevention advice has historically focused on personal measures: wearing long sleeves and pants in wooded areas, using EPA-approved repellents containing DEET or permethrin, checking for ticks after outdoor activity, and consulting a doctor quickly if flu-like symptoms appear after a suspected bite. Those measures remain important. But public health researchers have increasingly argued that individual-level prevention, however effective for a single person, cannot substantially reduce population-level infection rates unless tick densities are also addressed. The new pilot program is a federal investment in that population-level strategy.
The department also reaffirmed a goal announced under the previous Trump term: reducing Lyme disease cases by 25 percent by 2035 compared to 2022 levels. Whether Thursday’s new initiatives can meaningfully accelerate progress toward that benchmark will depend on the tick control pilot’s results, the uptake of new diagnostics, and how effectively the innovation challenges generate actionable breakthroughs.
Three New Innovation Challenges
Kennedy announced three new competitions under the LymeX Innovation Accelerator, the public-private partnership between HHS and the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation:
The LymeX Visible Voices Prize offers up to $250,000 for the development of educational tools and public awareness campaigns built with input from patients, clinicians, and advocates. The emphasis on patient involvement in design reflects a recognition that Lyme disease education campaigns have historically failed to reach the people most affected, or have not addressed the actual gaps in public understanding.
The LymeX Healthathon Innovation Sprint offers up to $250,000 to identify promising frontline solutions, including novel uses of existing medicines and drug repurposing strategies. Drug repurposing, the process of identifying new therapeutic uses for approved compounds, has become an increasingly important avenue in infectious disease research because it dramatically shortens the path to clinical use.
The TOPx HHS Tech Sprint for AI and Invisible Illness offers up to $2 million, including a $1 million grand prize, to harness artificial intelligence and open data to help patients with Lyme disease and other conditions sometimes described as invisible illnesses get faster answers and better access to care. “Invisible illness” is a term used in patient communities to describe conditions that produce significant functional impairment without obvious external signs, creating barriers to diagnosis, treatment, and social recognition. Lyme disease patients, particularly those with persistent symptoms after initial treatment, have often reported years of misdiagnosis or dismissal.
These challenges build on the LymeX ecosystem’s existing track record. Over the past two years, two improved FDA-cleared Lyme disease diagnostics have reached the market through the LymeX accelerator, and the program launched a separate $10 million Diagnostics Prize aimed at accelerating next-generation testing.
Alpha-Gal Syndrome: A Hidden Tick-Borne Epidemic
One of the lesser-known dimensions of Thursday’s announcement was new action on Alpha-gal syndrome, a tick-associated condition that can trigger potentially serious allergic reactions to red meat and other mammalian products. The CDC estimates that nearly 500,000 Americans are living with Alpha-gal syndrome, though Kennedy noted that emerging evidence suggests the true number may be significantly higher, because many cases go undiagnosed or are attributed to other causes.
Alpha-gal syndrome develops when the bite of a Lone Star tick transmits a sugar molecule called alpha-galactose into the bloodstream. The immune system of some people mounts an allergic response to this sugar, which is also present in mammalian meat. The reaction can range from mild hives to anaphylaxis, and because the link between a tick bite and a beef allergy that develops weeks later is not intuitive, the condition is routinely misdiagnosed.
Through ongoing discussions with private-sector innovators, NIH has preliminarily identified promising products that may help protect individuals from developing Alpha-gal syndrome following a tick bite. Under the anticipated collaboration, participating companies would provide candidate products while NIH would fund and support the clinical research needed to evaluate effectiveness. HHS said it expects to provide additional details in the coming months.
Connecting Patients to Providers
Kennedy also announced a new public-private collaboration with the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, known as ILADS. Through hhs.gov/lyme, patients will be able to access ILADS’ clinician locator tool, which connects individuals and families with experienced providers and educational resources related to Lyme disease and associated chronic conditions. The clinician locator addresses a persistent gap: many patients with complex or long-term Lyme disease symptoms report significant difficulty finding physicians willing or equipped to treat them.
The secretary also reiterated his support for reauthorization of the bipartisan Kay-Hagan Tick Act, which established the nation’s first coordinated federal strategy for preventing and controlling vector-borne diseases. The act was originally signed into law by President Trump in 2019 and recently advanced unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee, suggesting strong bipartisan support for continuation.
Sophia Sargent, a Lyme disease survivor and advocate, spoke at Thursday’s event about the human cost the announcements are aimed at addressing. “Four people, one family, critical years of life stolen from my siblings simply because they didn’t have the strength to get out of bed each day,” Sargent said.
New Hampshire residents with questions about tick prevention can find guidance through the state’s Division of Public Health Services. The state’s outdoor and recreational economy, covered recently in our report on New Hampshire’s $2.6 billion summer tourism season, depends in part on visitors feeling safe in the state’s forests and trails. The governor’s office has also been active on public health this session: Ayotte’s work on Medicaid and wraparound mental health services reflects a broader pattern of state-level health policy activity in Concord.
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