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.
What kind of plants and animals are found in Japan? Go to the Q & A section of our page on Nature and Climate. Where are earthquake fault lines located in Japan? For information about earthquakes in Japan, go to Why is Japan prone to earthquakes? How many earthquakes has Japan had? Each year countless earthquakes occur in Japan, but most are so small that they can't be felt. Over the last century, Japan has experienced 23 earthquakes that have caused major damage, one of the biggest being the Great Hanshin Earthquake that occurred in Kobe in 1995. The most devastating earthquake in modern times was the great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923, in which 100,000 died.