The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced $3 million in funding new research initiatives to combat tick-borne diseases, including Lyme disease and alpha-gal syndrome. 

“Tickborne diseases are spreading across America, and HHS is taking action to stop them at the source,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a statement. “CDC and NIH are targeting ticks where they feed and reproduce, testing new approaches to break their life cycle and reduce the risk to American families. Our goal is clear: fewer ticks, fewer bites, and fewer Americans suffering from Lyme disease, alpha-gal syndrome, and other tickborne illnesses.”

Aim is to lower tick populations

The money will be given to two of the CDC’s Centers of Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases to reduce tick populations. The projects will reduce tick numbers via providing deer with acaricide-treated feed to stop ticks from completing the blood meal they need to produce eggs, and pursuing next-generation bait delivery systems targeted to rodents. Deer are reservoirs of adult blacklegged (deer) ticks and lone star ticks, and rodents are hosts for juvenile blacklegged ticks and reservoirs for Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme.

This effort is designed to move tick control forward by evaluating large-scale deployment of wildlife-targeted intervention.

“This effort is designed to move tick control forward by evaluating large-scale deployment of wildlife-targeted interventions,” said Lyle Petersen, MD, MPH, director of CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases. “The ultimate goal is simple but ambitious: reduce the number of ticks to stop tick bites and tickborne diseases.”

According to HHS, nearly 31 million people in the United States may be bitten by a tick, and more than half a million Americans are diagnosed as having tick-borne diseases each year.

Women with uncomplicated urinary tract infections (uUTIs) saw symptom relief as early as 24 hours after taking gepotidacin, according to the results of a single-arm, nonrandomized clinical trial.

Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for treating uUTIs in March 2025, gepotidacin is a novel antibiotic that uses a distinct mechanism of action to inhibit bacterial replication. It was developed to provide an additional treatment option amid rising drug resistance in the bacteria that commonly cause uUTIs.

“Treatment with an inappropriate or ineffective antibiotic can lead to suboptimal outcomes, such as lack of symptom relief, increased antimicrobial resistance rates, treatment failure, and recurrence,” researchers with British drugmaker GSK, which developed the antibiotic in collaboration with the US government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, wrote yesterday in JAMA Network Open.

For the study, the researchers wanted to assess how quickly patients experienced symptom improvement. They enrolled 97 female patients aged 12 and older who had at least two UTI symptoms to receive oral gepotidacin twice daily for five days. The primary outcome was clinical symptom improvement within 24 hours of treatment initiation. The secondary outcomes were clinical symptom improvement and resolution at 48, 72, and 96 hours after treatment initiation (two, three, and four days later).

54% see symptom improvement at 24 hours

Among the 90 women in the clinically evaluable population for the primary outcome, 49 (54%) had symptom improvement at 24 hours. The proportion of women with symptom improvement at 48, 72, and 96 hours was 80%, 90%, and 87%, respectively. Clinical symptom resolution increased from 3% of participants at 24 hours to 90% at day 10. 

No serious adverse events were observed.

“Few previous antibiotic studies have reported symptom improvement in uUTIs at similar early time points,” the authors wrote. “Together these findings support gepotidacin as an option to address the unmet need for new oral antibacterials in uUTI treatment and provide a basis for more informed discussions between patients and clinicians regarding treatment expectations.”