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.
Lyme disease was recognized in 1976 because of close clustering of cases in Lyme, Connecticut and is now the most commonly reported tick-borne illness in the US. It has been reported in 49 states, but > 90% of cases occur from Maine to Virginia and in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. On the West Coast, most cases occur in northern California and Oregon. Lyme disease also occurs in Europe, across the former Soviet Union, and in China and Japan.