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.
Deer ticks and dog ticks are found throughout Massachusetts. They are tiny. In the photos below, ticks are shown next to a postage stamp and a finger tip, to give an idea of the size of the ticks. Because they are so small, you can't always tell easily when they are on you.