High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! 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." . The term is often erroneously used synonymously with isolation, which is "to separate ill persons who have a communicable disease from those who are healthy." .(The word comes from the Italian (seventeenth century Venetian) quarantena, meaning forty-day period. Quarantine can be applied to humans, but also to animals of various kinds. Quarantine can apply to humans and animals as part of border control, as well as within a country.