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.
Ticks that have been implicated in tick paralysis in the United States are the Rocky Mountain wood tick, the lone star tick, and the American dog tick. However, not all members of a species cause tick paralysis. The toxin that causes this condition is part of the salivary fluid that the tick injects.