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.
If they do bite you, you'll probably just feel the same level of pain as a bee sting. 5) Some people in Japan reportedly keep them as pets. They're known as Gejigeji, they can get upsettingly large, and according to some bloggers, some people in Japan really do keep them as pets.