A quarantine is a restriction on the movement of people, animals, and goods which is intended to prevent the spread of disease or pests. It is often used in connection to disease and illness, preventing the movement of those who may have been exposed to a communicable disease, yet do not have a confirmed medical diagnosis. It is distinct from medical isolation, in which those confirmed to be infected with a communicable disease are isolated from the healthy population. Quarantine considerations are often one aspect of border control.
In epidemiology, an outbreak is a sudden increase in occurrences of a disease when cases are in excess of normal expectancy for the location or season. It may affect a small and localized group or impact upon thousands of people across an entire continent. The number of cases varies according to the disease-causing agent, and the size and type of previous and existing exposure to the agent. Outbreaks include many epidemics, which term is normally only for infectious diseases, as well as diseases with an environmental origin, such as a water or foodborne disease. They may affect a region in a country or a group of countries. Pandemics are near-global disease outbreaks when multiple and various countries around the Earth are soon infected.
The Control of Communicable Diseases Manual (CCDM) is one of the most widely recognized reference volumes on the topic of infectious diseases. It is useful for physicians, epidemiologists, global travelers, emergency volunteers and all who have dealt with or might have to deal with public health issues.
Disease surveillance is an epidemiological practice by which the spread of disease is monitored in order to establish patterns of progression. The main role of disease surveillance is to predict, observe, and minimize the harm caused by outbreak, epidemic, and pandemic situations, as well as increase knowledge about which factors contribute to such circumstances. A key part of modern disease surveillance is the practice of disease case reporting.
A notifiable disease is any disease that is required by law to be reported to government authorities. The collation of information allows the authorities to monitor the disease, and provides early warning of possible outbreaks. In the case of livestock diseases, there may also be the legal requirement to kill the infected livestock upon notification. Many governments have enacted regulations for reporting of both human and animal diseases.
Globalization, the flow of information, goods, capital, and people across political and geographic boundaries, allows infectious diseases to rapidly spread around the world, while also allowing the alleviation of factors such as hunger and poverty, which are key determinants of global health. The spread of diseases across wide geographic scales has increased through history. Early diseases that spread from Asia to Europe were bubonic plague, influenza of various types, and similar infectious diseases.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, formed in 1946, is the leading national public health institute of the United States. It is a United States federal agency, under the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Its main goal is to protect public health and safety through the control and prevention of disease, injury, and disability in the US and internationally.
The International Health Regulations (IHR), first adopted by the World Health Assembly in 1969 and last revised in 2005, are a legally binding rules that only apply to the WHO that is an instrument that aims for international collaboration "to prevent, protect against, control, and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks and that avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade". The IHR is the only international legal treaty with the responsibility of empowering the World Health Organization (WHO) to act as the main global surveillance system.
Surveillance for communicable diseases is the main public health surveillance activity in China. Currently, the disease surveillance system in China has three major components:
William Perry Briggs (1856-1928) was the Medical Officer of Health for both the Wigton Rural District Sanitary Board and the Aspatria Urban District Council from the early 1880s until the time of his death in 1928.
The Infectious Disease (Notification) Act 1889 first appeared on the UK national statute books in 1889. It was compulsory in London and optional in the rest of the country. It later became a mandatory law with the Infectious Disease (Notification) Extension Act 1899. These acts required householders and/or general practitioners to report cases of infectious disease to the local sanitary authority. The following diseases were covered by the acts: smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, membranous croup. erysipelas, scarlatina or scarlet fever, typhus fever, typhoid fever, enteric fever, relapsing fever, continued fever and puerperal fever. Householders or general practitioners who failed to notify a case of one of these diseases was liable to a fine of up to forty shillings.
The Norwegian Institute of Public Health is responsible for maintaining and revising the list of notifiable diseases in Norway and participates in the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization's surveillance of infectious diseases. The notifiable diseases are classified into Group A, Group B and Group C diseases, depending on the procedure for reporting the disease.
In the United States, the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS) is responsible for sharing information regarding notifiable diseases. As of 2020, the following are the notifiable diseases in the US as mandated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
A notifiable disease is one which the law requires to be reported to government authorities.
The Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) is part of Ireland's Health Service Executive.
A fever hospital or isolation hospital is a hospital for infectious diseases such as Scarlet fever, Tuberculosis, Lassa fever and Smallpox. Their purpose is to treat affected people while isolating them from the general population. Early examples included the Liverpool Fever Hospital (1801) and the London Fever Hospital (1802). Other examples occurred elsewhere in the British Isles and India.
The Public Health Regulations 1988, created by the Department of Health and Social Care, came into force on 1 October 1988 and was associated with the previous Public Health Act 1984. 24 more diseases were added, indicating exact control powers that could be applied to individual diseases.
National Quarantine Act of 1878 established quarantine regulations for foreign nautical vessels pursuing entrance into United States maritime ports. The United States statute declared it to be an unlawful pursuit for international vessels departing harbors termed as infected maritime ports to enter United States seaports and territorial waters. The Act of Congress authorized the prevention of communicable and transmissible diseases from entering or being introduced by any vehicle beyond the borders of the United States.
