HHS Aims to Accelerate Technologies for Combatting Lyme Disease RolfAasa/iStock
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The Health and Human Services Department recently kicked off market research to inform an ambitious, multimillion-dollar effort to spur rapid breakthroughs against Lyme disease, a common tick-borne illness that can upend lives.
“With 30-plus years of the funding for Lyme and everything not going up much but the cases increasing a lot patients have looked at it as the government is ignoring them, and denying their suffering. And it s just been really antagonistic,” HHS Chief Data Scientist Kristen Honey told
Nextgov this week. “Usually when there s political or scientific controversy like that, it means we need more data. We need more information, more science and science will be our way out.”