In January 2024, the US Department of Health and Human Services published the first-ever national strategy to address the global threat of vector-borne diseases. Its publication not only marked a milestone in the federal government’s investment in public health resources and research but also the culmination of nearly 50 years of a citizen-led effort to motivate the scientific and medical communities and the government to find effective diagnostic and therapeutic solutions to vector-borne diseases like Lyme disease, as well as long-haul conditions like Long COVID.
In SSIR’s spring issue, Bernadette Clavier, an advisor to the Bay Area Lyme Foundation and the former executive director of the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, chronicles the fascinating story of community and government action that led to the national tick-borne strategy.
Lyme disease, she shows, is only a small manifestation of the much larger public health issue of complex chronic diseases. As has been seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, which is still killing thousands of people each month in the United States, the existing medical infrastructure fails to provide the care that viruses, chronic diseases, and long-haul conditions demand.
Clavier calls for “all relevant disease communities of patients, doctors, and scientists to start working together and collaboratively with our government representatives on a new, even more ambitious national strategy that can provide academics and industry leaders with a helpful framework to address infection-associated chronic diseases across the many complex and elusive conditions that affect people today.”
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