quarantine - Practices, History, Notable Quarantines, List of Quarantine Service in the World
A period during which people or animals suspected of carrying a contagious disease are kept in isolation. Originally quarantine was an attempt to prevent the spread of plague in the 14th-c: ships arriving at port were kept isolated and offshore for 40 days (Ital quarantina) - perhaps because this was the period spent in isolation in the desert by Moses and Jesus. Later the principle was applied to many infectious diseases, and the time shortened to relate to the incubation period of the particular infection. The practice is now rarely used in human illness: possible infected suspects are merely kept under medical supervision at home or in hospital. It is still applied to dogs and other animals imported from overseas into some countries, as a defence against the spread of rabies; a 6-month period is normal. In March 2000, pet passports were introduced in the UK, allowing pet owners to take their dogs and cats to EU countries without the animals having to spend time in quarantine upon return. Plants also are subject to international quarantine laws.
Quarantine is enforced isolation, typically to contain the spread of something considered dangerous (often disease).
Quarantine is also used as a general term for blockading (such as the naval blockade during the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s) or for denying access systematically to a resource.
Practices
For example, due to the risk of introducing rabies from Continental Europe, the United Kingdom used to require all dogs (and, indeed, most animals) introduced to the country to spend six months in quarantine at an HM Customs and Excise pound; this policy was abolished at the beginning of the 21st Century in favour of a scheme generally known as Pet Passports, where animals can avoid quarantine if they have documentation showing they are up to date on their appropriate vaccinations.
In the case of people, quarantine usually raises questions of civil rights, especially in cases of long confinement or segregation from society, such as that of Mary Mallon, a typhoid fever carrier. The first astronauts to visit the Moon were quarantined upon their return at a specially built Lunar Receiving Laboratory.
Some 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 until people could be showered in a decontamination tent.
Standard-Times senior correspondent Steve Urbon (2/14/03) describes such temporary quarantine powers:
Civil rights activists in some cases have objected to people being rounded up, stripped and showered against their will. Chmiel said local health authorities have "certain powers to quarantine people."
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.
History
The word quarantine (from Medieval French une quarantaine de jours, a period of forty days) originates from a 40 day isolation of ships and people prior to entering the city of Dubrovnik (aka Ragusa). The original document from 1377, which is kept in the Archives of Dubrovnik, states that before entering the city, newcomers had to spend 30 days in a restricted location (originally nearby islands) waiting to see whether the symptoms of plague would develop. Later on, isolation was prolonged to 40 days and was called quarantine.
Other diseases lent themselves to the practice of quarantine before and after the devastation of the Plague.
Those afflicted with leprosy were historically isolated from society The attempts to check the invasion of syphilis in northern Europe about 1490, the advent of yellow fever in Spain at the beginning of the 19th century and the arrival of Asiatic cholera in 1831Venice took the lead in measures to check the spread of plague, having appointed three guardians of the public health in the first years of the Black Death (1348).
The plague had disappeared from England, never to return, for more than thirty years before the practice of quarantine against it was definitely established by an act of British Parliament of Queen Anne's reign (1710). The first act was called for, owing to an alarm, lest plague should be imported from Poland and the Baltics; the second act of 1721 was due to the disastrous prevalence of plague at Marseille and other places in Provence; In 1752 a rigorous quarantine clause was introduced into an act regulating the Levantine trade; Although no plague cases ever came to England all those years, the restrictions on traffic became more and more stringent (following the movements of medical dogma), and in 1788 a very oppressive Quarantine Act was passed, with provisions affecting cargoes in particular. The first year of the 19th century marked the turning-point in quarantine legislation; In 1805 there was another new act, and in 1823-24 again an elaborate inquiry followed by an act making the quarantine only at discretion of the privy council, and at the same time recognizing yellow fever or other highly infectious disorder as calling for quarantine measures along with plague. The steady approach of cholera in 1831 was the last occasion in England of a thoroughgoing resort to quarantine restrictions. In 1847 the privy council ordered all arrivals with clean bills from the Black Sea and the Levant to be admitted to free pratique, provided there had been no case of plague during the voyage; and therewith the last remnant of the once formidable quarantine practice against plague may be said to have disappeared.
For a number of years after the passing of the first Quarantine Act (1710) the protective practices in England were of the most haphazard and arbitrary kind. In 1721 two vessels laden with cotton goods from Cyprus, then a seat of plague, were ordered to be burned with their cargoes, the owners receiving 23,935 as indemnity. coming from a country where plague existed) had to repair to the lazarets of Malta, Venice, Messina, Leghorn, Genoa or Marseille, to perform their quarantine or to have their cargoes sufficiently opened and aired. Since 1741 Stangate Creek (on the Medway) had been made the quarantine station at home; There was no medical inspection employed, but the whole routine left to the officers of customs and quarantine. In 1780, when plague was in Poland, even vessels with grain from the Baltic had to lie forty days in quarantine, and unpack and air the sacks; About 1788 an order of the council required every ship liable to quarantine, in case of meeting any vessel at sea, or within four leagues of the coast of Great Britain or Ireland, to hoist a yellow flag in the daytime and show a light at the main topmast head at night, under a penalty of 200 pounds. After 1800, ships from plague-countries (or with foul bills) were enabled to perform their quarantine on arrival in the Medway instead of taking a Mediterranean port on the way for that purpose; About this period it was merchandise that was chiefly suspected: there was a long schedule of susceptible articles, and these were first exposed on the ships deck for twenty-one days or less (six days for each instalment of the cargo), and then transported to the lazaret, where they were opened and aired forty days more. her freight was 1475 and her quarantine dues 610. The same year the Pilato, 495 tons, making the same voyage, paid 200 quarantine dues on a freight of 1060. In 1823 the expenses of the quarantine service (at various ports) were 26,090, and the dues paid by shipping (nearly all with clean bills) 22,000. From 1846 onwards the establishments in the United Kingdom were gradually reduced, while the last vestige of the British quarantine law was removed by the Public Health Act of 1896, which repealed the Quarantine Act of 1825 (with dependent clauses of other acts), and transferred from the privy council to the Local Government Board the powers to deal with ships arriving infected with yellow fever or plague, the powers to deal with cholera ships having been already transferred by the Public Health Act of 1875.
The British regulations of 9th November 1896 applied to yellow fever, plague and cholera.
International Conventions
Since 1852 several conferences have been held between delegates of the European powers, with a view to uniform action in keeping out infection from the East and preventing its spread within Europe; The general effect has been an abandonment of the high quarantine doctrine of constructive infection of a ship as coming from a scheduled port, and an approximation to the principles advocated by Great Britain for many years.
The Venice convention of 1892 was on cholera by the Suez Canal route; and that of Venice, in 1897, was in connection with the outbreak of plague in the East, and the conference met to settle on an international basis the steps to be taken to prevent, if possible, its spread into Europe.
One of the first points to be dealt with in 1897 was to settle the incubation period for this disease, and the period to be adopted for administrative purposes. Each government had to notify to other governments on the existence of plague within their several jurisdictions, and at the same time state the measures of prevention which are being carried out to prevent its diffusion. The area deemed to be infected was limited to the actual district or village where the disease prevailed, and no locality was deemed to be infected merely because of the importation into it of a few cases of plague while there has been no diffusion of the malady. As regards the precautions to be taken on land frontiers, it was decided that during the prevalence of plague every country had the inherent right to close its land frontiers against traffic. It was also agreed that vessels passing through the Canal in quarantine might, subject to the use of the electric light, coal in quarantine at Port Said by night as well as by day, and that passengers might embark in quarantine at that port. Infected vessels, if these carry a doctor and are provided with a disinfecting stove, have a right to navigate the Canal, in quarantine, subject only to the landing of those who were suffering from plague.
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