You made it through May. For a lot of Lyme patients, that means six weeks of weather changes, antibiotic rotations, and symptoms that refused to sit still. It was also a busy month in the broader Lyme world. Here's what happened, and what we published.
What happened outside your window
May closed with a government action plan that Lyme advocates have been pushing toward for years. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a set of new initiatives aimed at tick-borne illness: a pilot program on tick control, up to $2.5 million in innovation challenges, NIH funding for Alpha-gal syndrome research, and a new public-private effort to connect patients with experienced providers.
Emergency department visits for tick bites were up more than 25% in April 2026 compared to the same month in 2025, the highest rate for that time of year since 2017. Tick season is starting earlier and spreading into new regions. The Northeast and Upper Midwest remain the core zones, but the mid-Atlantic and parts of the Southeast are seeing more activity too.
Two vaccine candidates stayed in the news. Moderna's mRNA-based options, mRNA-1975 and mRNA-1982, are currently in Phase 1/2 trials. Tonix Pharmaceuticals is working on TNX-4800, an anti-OspA monoclonal antibody designed for seasonal prophylaxis. Neither is close to approval. The pipeline is more active than it has been in two decades, though.
Living Evidence Guidelines version 2.0 launched in May, with a commitment to update every six months as new data comes in. That's a real change from guidelines that sat static for years at a time.
What we published
Six guides went up in May, covering the symptoms and situations that come up most often in patient conversations.
What Is a Herxheimer Reaction? explains what happens in your body when antibiotics start killing Borrelia. If you felt worse after starting doxy or an herbal protocol and didn't know why, this one works through the mechanism, the typical timeline, and what actually calls for a doctor's attention.
What Brain Fog Really Feels Like with Lyme covers the cognitive symptoms that clinical descriptions usually flatten into a single phrase. Losing words mid-sentence, failing to hold onto a task, the specific way it differs from ordinary fatigue. It's written for patients, not clinicians.
Why Lyme Symptoms Migrate Day to Day is for anyone who's noticed that their symptoms seem to rotate across joints or systems with no obvious pattern. The migration is a real phenomenon with a real explanation, and the guide walks through why tracking the location of symptoms, not just their severity, turns out to be useful.
Why You Feel Worse Before a Storm looks at the barometric pressure connection that Lyme patients report constantly. The research is thinner than the anecdotal evidence at this point. The guide helps you start logging weather as a factor alongside your symptoms so you can see whether the pattern holds for you specifically.
Joint Pain Patterns in Chronic Lyme covers the common ways joint pain presents: migratory, asymmetric, tied to herx cycles. This one is particularly useful if your joint symptoms have been dismissed as non-specific or confused with fibromyalgia or inflammatory arthritis.
Sleep and Lyme: Why It Wrecks You is about the relationship between Lyme and sleep disruption. Not just that Lyme causes poor sleep, but how broken sleep amplifies every other symptom you're dealing with. The guide covers the patterns worth tracking and what useful data actually looks like after a few weeks of logging.
How these pieces connect
Six different topics, but they circle the same problem. Lyme symptoms are hard to read in isolation. A single bad day tells you almost nothing. Weeks of logged data, stacked against sleep quality, treatment changes, weather, and stress, can show you things that aren't visible any other way.
The 5-step daily check-in in LymeTrack is built for exactly this. Each day, you record symptoms on a 1 to 5 severity scale, log any treatments, and tag the factors that might be affecting your day: sleep, stress, activity, diet, weather. The Compass and Insights view in the app then draws the connections across that data. Which treatments correlate with which symptom changes. Whether your joint pain tracks with weather shifts. Whether poor sleep predicts the following day's fatigue.
All of that data feeds into a doctor-shareable report that gives your LLMD something concrete to work from, rather than your best attempt to reconstruct the last three months from memory.
Further reading
Sources used in this month's research:
- HHS: Sweeping Plan to Combat Lyme Disease and Advance Treatment. The May 2026 announcement, covering tick control initiatives, innovation funding, and patient access programs.
- Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School: Media Briefing on Ticks and Lyme Disease 2026. A factual overview of the 2026 tick season with specific data on rising emergency department visits.
- IDSA Science Speaks: Tick-Borne Disease Vaccines, What Clinicians Should Know in 2026. A clear summary of the current vaccine pipeline, including the Moderna mRNA candidates and the Tonix monoclonal antibody.
LymeTrack is a tracking tool, not medical advice. Talk to your LLMD or treating physician before changing a treatment plan.