<Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This article needs additional citations for verification . Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources . Unsourced material may be challenged and removed . (May 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) </Td> </Tr> <P> A quarantine is used to separate and restrict the movement of people; it is a' 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 . 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". The word 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 . </P> <P> 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 spent the last 24 years and 7 months her life under quarantine . </P> <P> 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). </P>

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