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.
In most circumstances, it is not the tick bite but the toxins, secretions, or organisms in the tick's saliva transmitted through the bite that cause disease. Ticks (and mites) are arthropods, like spiders. There are more than 800 species of ticks throughout the world. Many organisms that bite humans for a blood meal are not ticks and should not be confused with ticks. Some common examples are mosquitoes, bedbugs and fleas (these are insects, not arthropods).