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Quarantines, isolation can help in pandemics

Infection Control Monitor, August 10, 2007

Traditional public health tools-such as quarantines, isolation, closing schools, and social-distancing in the community and workplace-can help save lives in the event of a pandemic.

At least that's what history has shown in a new study that looks at nonpharmaceutical  measures taken during the world's last great pandemic-the Spanish flu in 1918. The new report, published in the August 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, details the findings of a team of public-health experts that evaluated the country's response to Spanish flu.

Researchers looked at public-health measures taken by 43 U.S. cities and found those that took early, sustained, and layered interventions fared better than others, with slower rates of infection and lower death rates. "The conventional wisdom had been that cities [in 1918] had done everything they could and nothing worked-it was all doom and gloom and dread and nothing to do but throw up our hands in despair," Martin Cetron, MD, director of the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and a senior author of the study, told Time Magazine. "This study gives us real reason for optimism, that even reaching back to a time where there were no antiviral medications and no well-matched vaccines to fight a pandemic, the things communities did in terms of traditional public health tools-isolation, quarantine, social-distancing, canceling schools-made a big difference and have a lot of potential to mitigate the severity of a lethal disease pandemic."

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