Press Releases

Congressman Max Rose, a member of the Congressional Lyme Disease Caucus, is calling on Congressional leadership to pass the Ticks: Identify, Control, and Knockout (TICK) Act of 2019 to create a government-wide approach toward understanding and combatting Lyme Disease. This effort comes as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released their new strategic plan to combat Lyme and other tickborne diseases.

“Lyme disease has ravaged our communities on Staten Island and in South Brooklyn,” Rose said. “I won’t stop fighting until it gets the attention we need to find a cure. The NIH’s plan coupled with the TICK Act are large steps in the right direction to ensure that the federal government’s response to Lyme disease is targeted to communities that need it most.”

The legislation increases coordination among key agencies in the fight against Lyme disease and supports the NIH’s new strategic plan released this month on five key areas: improving our knowledge of these diseases, creating rapid diagnostic testing, developing diagnostics that can predict treatment success, advancing research on treatments, and improving access to data for scientists.

In a bipartisan letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Rose and his colleagues urged the committee to take up consideration of the TICK Act as soon as possible. The bill boosts funding and creates new federal grants to provide funding for critical research, prevention and protection programs, and coordinates efforts across all involved federal agencies to fight Lyme disease.

“The NIH is among the most important federal agencies for fighting Lyme and the announcement of a Strategic Plan across its institutes is a step in the right direction—but not enough,” wrote Rose and his bipartisan colleagues to Committee leaders. “The TICK Act will develop a whole-of-government National Strategy to prevent and treat Lyme and other vector-borne diseases. The bill boosts funding and creates new federal grants to provide funding for critical research, prevention and protection programs, and coordinates efforts across all involved federal agencies to fight Lyme disease.”

Lyme disease is a physically devastating tick-borne condition that has a significant presence on Staten Island. There are 329,000 new reported cases each year (and even more unreported cases). Yet the government gives it a fraction of the funding per patient compared to other vector-borne diseases. The NIH spends just $73 per patient on Lyme disease, as compared to $91,831 on Malaria and $19,417 on West Nile Virus. Lyme also has about 164 times as many affected patients in the U.S. as West Nile Virus and Malaria.

Full text of letter HERE.

###