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.
Types of Ticks Found in the U.S. There are many different species of ticks found around the world but there are five species which are most common. These types of ticks are: Deer Tick (Ixodes scapularis): Also known as the blacklegged tick, the deer tick is most commonly found in deciduous forest areas.