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.
The answer is no, deer ticks are not present in the area which means that there is not a local threat for contracting Lyme disease. But this does not mean that there are not still problems with Hawaii ticks in and around your home and property or on your family and pets. Although the spread of tick borne diseases are not common in Hawaii, tick paralysis is still a possibility, which is why avoiding ticks and tick bites in particular is a good idea.