Quarantine

A quarantine is used to separate and restrict the movement of people; it is a 'restraint upon the activities or communication of persons or the transport of goods designed to prevent the spread of disease or pests,' for a certain period of time. This is often used in connection to disease and illness, such as those who may possibly have been exposed to a communicable disease, but do not have a confirmed medical diagnosis. The term is often erroneously used to mean medical isolation, which is 'to separate ill persons who have a communicable disease from those who are healthy,' and refers to patients whose diagnosis has been confirmed. Quarantine may be used interchangeably with cordon sanitaire, and although the terms are related, cordon sanitaire refers to the restriction of movement of people into or out of a defined geographic area, such as a community, in order to prevent an infection from spreading. The word quarantine comes from an Italian variant (seventeenth-century Venetian) of 'quaranta giorni', meaning forty days, the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic. Quarantine can be applied to humans, but also to animals of various kinds, and both as part of border control as well as within a country. The quarantining of people often raises questions of civil rights, especially in cases of long confinement or segregation from society, such as that of Mary Mallon (aka Typhoid Mary), a typhoid fever carrier who was arrested and quarantined in 1907 and later spent the last 24 years and 7 months of her life in medical isolation at Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island. Quarantine periods can be very short, such as in the case of a suspected anthrax attack, in which persons are allowed to leave as soon as they shed their potentially contaminated garments and undergo a decontamination shower. For example, an article entitled 'Daily News workers quarantined' describes a brief quarantine that lasted until people could be showered in a decontamination tent. (Kelly Nankervis, Daily News). The February/March 2003 issue of HazMat Magazine suggests that people be 'locked in a room until proper decon could be performed', in the event of 'suspect anthrax'. Standard-Times senior correspondent Steve Urbon (14 February 2003) describes such temporary quarantine powers: The purpose of such quarantine-for-decontamination is to prevent the spread of contamination, and to contain the contamination such that others are not put at risk from a person fleeing a scene where contamination is suspect. It can also be used to limit exposure, as well as eliminate a vector.