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 Japanese encephalitis virus causes swelling of the brain and possible long-term nerve and brain damage. It is spread to humans by the bite of an infected mosquito. Leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease that is transmitted by the bite of female phlebotomine sand flies. It occurs in tropical and subtropical areas.