Quarantine was introduced at very first time for limiting the spread of cholera and later for plague and yellow fever.
But with the advent of more holistic global surveillance on all emerging and reemerging infections along with epidemic alerts and other coordinated efforts, the need of quarantine has been minimized.
Therefore the epidemiologists have to revise the concept of epidemiological practices for epidemics in lieu of public health advancements of this century.
Quarantine is used to separate and restrict the movement of well persons who may have been exposed to a communicable disease to see if they become ill.
Quarantine is a term which has been applied to many different systems of disease prevention, but it is generally used in two specific senses: first, it involves the segregation and isolation of individuals, suspected of being infected with a communicable disease, for at least the period of likely incubation; more generally, it refers to the maritime practice of forcibly detaining and segregating all vessels arriving in port, together with the people and things on board, when suspected of certain diseases, for specified periods, usually about forty days. The individuals quarantined may in each case be perfectly healthy, but the suspicion that they are harbouring disease provokes the application of quarantine procedures.
Quarantine as a way to control the spread of contagious diseases is an extreme form of isolation, which has several less severe variations. Bedside isolation, in which patients suffering from an infectious disease are barrier nursed to break the chain of transmission, is the mildest variation. More dangerous varieties of contagious disease, such as pulmonary tuberculosis with excretion of tubercle bacilli, diphtheria, and cholera, are preferably isolated in a special hospital or closed ward. Until recently, patients with such diseases as typhoid, paralytic poliomyelitis, and meningococcal meningitis were strictly isolated and every effort was made to preserve a cordon sanitaire around them. Their contacts were quarantined under public health laws in some jurisdictions, even though epidemiologically this made little or no sense as a means of preventing transmission of infection. Powerful antibiotics and better understanding have made quarantine unnecessary for these and many other diseases. Infected patients are now often treated in a general hospital rather than in one dedicated to infectious diseases. The practice of universal precautions is a modified form of quarantine in which patients with a contagious disease (such as HIV/AIDS are barrier nursed and otherwise cared for so as to minimize the risk of HIV transmission.
Public health officials who invoke quarantine laws or regulations must justify this action ethically—on the grounds that it is in the interests of the greater good of the community. In the past, this police power of public health officials was accepted by most people as a necessary measure to control the spread of contagious disease. Community values changed in the late twentieth century, however, and there is now emotional and political resistance to restricting freedom in the interests of safeguarding the public's health. It is regarded as ethically unacceptable to quarantine promiscuous persons who are HIV-positive, even though it might be in the best interests of the general public to do so. In some places, public health officials have invoked the police power of their quarantine regulations and, sometimes with the assistance of local police forces, they have incarcerated incorrigibly promiscuous persons infected with HIV/AIDS. AIDS activists and civil rights advocates oppose this, and a debate that played out in relation to detention of polio contacts in the early twentieth century is being reprised.
From point of view of zoonoses quarantine measure is the first line of defense of control measures of zoonotic diseases transmitted from animal to man and usually directed toward reducing or eliminating animal reservoir of infection imported from endemic countries, should be put under quarantine a period exceed incubation period of suspected disease and extend up to sixty days in some diseases such as rabies, tuberculosis, brucellosis to prevent disease transmission during incubation period of infection,
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