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.
1 Ticks are most prevalent in the Northeast and Upper Midwest parts of the United States. 2  Ticks usually leave an animal on their own when they are full, but this can often be after several days.  There are over 850 tick species, about 100 of which are capable of transmitting diseases.