Lyme & Tick-Borne Disease News

A Common Pesticide Keeps Showing Up in Parkinson’s

New findings: living near chlorpyrifos raises Parkinson’s risk more than 2.5-fold.

Chlorpyrifos is one of the most widely used pesticides on earth. The new UCLA work, published in Molecular Neurodegeneration, found it damages the exact nerve cells that Parkinson’s destroys.

Not a correlation buried in noise. A direct hit on the neurons that control movement.

We’ve been told these exposures are safe below a threshold. The people living next to the fields are telling a different story.

Source: UCLA Health / ScienceDaily.

Heart Failure, Infection & a Medical Brick Wall

My father developed end-stage heart failure in his early 60s. His cardiologists — good ones, by every measure — told us a heart transplant was his only option. They were wrong. Treating an overlooked infection permanently reversed the damage to his heart. He lived to nearly 90.

Up to 50% of cardiomyopathy cases are labeled “idiopathic” — meaning unknown cause. I’ve always disliked that word. It’s not an explanation; it’s an admission that we stopped asking questions. The connection between chronic infection and heart disease is well-documented, and yet it rarely makes it into the standard cardiology workup. Meanwhile, patients are handed a diagnosis with no origin story and a prognosis that doesn’t have to be as grim as presented.

This article is the case for asking harder questions. For not accepting “we don’t know” as a final answer. My father’s story is proof that the right question, asked at the right time, can change everything.

HHS Just Made the Largest Federal Commitment to Lyme Disease in History

More than 476,000 Americans are diagnosed with Lyme disease every year. Many more go undiagnosed. ER visits for tick bites just hit their highest springtime level in nearly a decade.

Washington finally noticed.

On May 29, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. announced a sweeping federal push against Lyme disease & tick-borne illness — one of the most significant in the department’s history. He delivered the news in New Hampshire, one of the hardest-hit states in the country.

Here’s what’s on the table:

  • A multi-million-dollar CDC-led tick control pilot program targeting ticks on wildlife before they reach humans.
  • Three new LymeX Innovation Challenges — up to $2.5M in prize funding — covering patient education, drug repurposing, & an AI sprint with a $1M grand prize for tools that help patients get faster answers.
  • A new $10M Diagnostics Prize to accelerate next-gen Lyme testing.
  • NIH is investing $50M/yr in Lyme research & $122M/yr in broader tick-borne disease research.
  • A new public-private collaboration with ILADS — so patients can finally find experienced providers through hhs.gov/lyme.

The stated goal: reduce Lyme cases 25% by 2035.

For patients who’ve spent years being dismissed, gaslit, or undertreated — this level of federal acknowledgment matters. Whether the follow-through matches the announcement is the real question.

Reasons to Love Monolaurin

Key points

  • Monolaurin is a medium-chain fatty acid derived from coconut oil.
  • It has broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity — against bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites.
  • The supporting research has been in the literature for years.
  • It helped Dr. Phillips and his patients when the strongest antibiotics had failed.
  • Important: it is not uniformly safe for everyone. The full series covers the benefits, evidence, dosing, and caution flags.

Years of the strongest antibiotics available had failed to get me well. Then I found monolaurin — a molecule derived from coconut oil that most people have never heard of — and it did what the pharmaceuticals couldn’t.

Monolaurin isn’t exotic or expensive. It’s a medium-chain fatty acid with a remarkable spectrum of antimicrobial activity against bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. The research on it is real and has been there for years, quietly sitting in the literature while the medical mainstream looked the other way. I’ve been publicly enthusiastic about it for a long time because it made a genuine difference in my life and in the lives of my patients.

There’s also an important warning I cover in the series — not everything about monolaurin is simple or uniformly safe for everyone. I go through the benefits, the evidence, the dosing considerations, and the caution flags. If you or someone you know is dealing with a chronic infection that hasn’t responded to conventional treatment, this is worth your time.

Read the full series on ZeroSpin

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Featured image: Coconut oil by Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Untangling Cardiovascular Disease (Parts 1–5)

This series is dedicated to my brother Jeff — taken by a heart attack at 59. No warning. No goodbye. Just gone.

That loss is what drove me to spend months digging into the research on cardiovascular disease, and what I found should be far better known than it is.

Cardiovascular disease kills more people than anything else on the planet. And yet the standard toolkit — statins, blood pressure medications, low-fat diets — isn’t moving the needle the way it should. The problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s that we’re looking in the wrong places.

There are interventions with striking evidence behind them that most cardiologists have never discussed with their patients: how vitamin K2 controls calcium metabolism — keeping it in the bones and out of the arteries — along with enzymes that can at least partially clear arterial plaque, and approaches to difficult cases that don’t dead-end at “we don’t know.”

From the biology of how vessels break down to what can actually reverse the damage, this five-part series lays it all out — the science, the evidence, and the honest conversation that cardiologists haven’t been having, because they simply don’t know about it.

Read the full series on ZeroSpin

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Dr. Steven Phillips Speaking at Health and Human Services Lyme Disease Roundtable — December 2025

Dr. Steven Phillips was invited to take part in a national Lyme disease roundtable convened and moderated by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The historic gathering took place in Washington, DC on December 15, 2025. It brought together clinicians and researchers to confront the diagnostic and clinical challenges of Lyme and other vector-borne illness, and marked a milestone in federal recognition of Lyme disease as a serious public-health priority.

An internationally recognized expert in chronic illness and co-author of Chronic, Dr. Phillips joined a distinguished group of federal leaders and experts, including Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, MD. At the roundtable, HHS announced the renewal of the LymeX Innovation Accelerator — a public-private partnership with the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation — including a $10 million initiative to advance AI-driven diagnostic tools for earlier, more accurate detection of Lyme disease.

Dr. Phillips was honored to contribute his clinical experience to this landmark national effort, and remains dedicated to ensuring patients with Lyme and other vector-borne illnesses receive the recognition, research, and care they deserve.

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Chronic featured in NY Times

The NY Times discusses Dr. Phillips’s new book about chronic illness

By Ross Douthat

As it happens, the minority view — that chronic Lyme is actually a chronic infection, not just an autoimmune response or a psychosomatic malady — has a new defense this month: a book called “Chronic: The Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Better Again,” written by Dr. Steven Phillips, a Lyme practitioner and researcher, and one of his patients, the musician Dana Parish.

The book makes the case that the spread of what the authors call Lyme+, an array of tick-borne pathogens that often infect patients simultaneously, is responsible not just for the more than 400,000 cases of Lyme disease diagnosed each year in the United States but also for an unknown number of chronic infections beyond that — undiagnosed or misdiagnosed and left untreated because of a combination of testing failures, institutional bias and the horrible complexity of the diseases themselves.

Then further, they argue that most of these cases can be treated effectively. Many people who are told they have a condition that can only be managed, not eliminated — to say nothing of the people told “It’s all in your head” — could claw back toward normalcy, if not always perfect health, with a long-term regimen of oral antibiotics and a doctor who’s willing to work with them to figure out which drug combination works.

Read more >

The NY Post names Chronic as one of “The best new books to read”

Steven Phillips and Dana Parish (nonfiction, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Dr. Phillips was a renowned physician when he himself became a patient — with a mystery illness that no one seemed able to diagnose. The same happened to Dana Parish. “Chronic” is a look at the pandemic of chronic conditions caused by common infections. A fascinating look at an area of health that is often misunderstood.

Read more >

Dr. Phillips & Dana Parish: keynote speakers at LymeMind

On October 10, 2020, Dr. Phillips and Dana Parish led a discussion about the topics in their upcoming book, “Chronic: The Hidden Cause of Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Healthy Again” at the 5th Annual LymeMIND Virtual Conference. Check out the full event schedule at lymemind.org/agenda

The LymeMIND team, based at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is made up of diverse experts in the areas of computational biology, epidemiology, software engineering, systems biology, and Lyme disease research.