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.
Ticks are vectors for the disease, meaning they carry it and transmit it, but they do not cause it. The disease is bacterial and can cause a range of symptoms. It was first seen in the United States in the 1970s, in the town of Lyme, Connecticut.