The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a law that was passed in 1996, designed primarily to modernize the flow of health information. At the time, most medical records were in paper form, but it was becoming clear that health data would become digital in the future.
Telford and Heidi Goethert, J93, a microbiologist at the Cummings School, sequenced the spirochete DNA, and identified it as Borrelia miyamotoi, which was first found in ticks in Japan in 1995 and is closely related to the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.
Click here for pictures of lone star ticks. Southern Tick Associated Rash Illness (STARI), also known as Masters disease, occurs after the bite of the lone star tick, Amblyomma americanum. The disease is thought to be caused by the bacterium Borrelia lonestari. However, this hypothesis is based on a single case of B. lonestari infection in a STARI patient.