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 1974, about 80% of Japanese children were getting pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine. That year there were only 393 cases of whooping cough in the entire country, and not a single pertussis-related death. Then immunization rates began to drop, until only about 10% of children were being vaccinated.