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.
Over 600 species of bird have been recorded in Japan and more than 250 of these breed. A number of birds are endemic including the Japanese woodpecker (Picus awokera), copper pheasant (Syrmaticus soemmerringii) and Japan's national bird, the green pheasant (Phasianus versicolor).