in medicine, separation of an infected individual (human or animal) from the healthy until that individual is no longer able to transmit the disease. In its strictest sense, the practice of isolation differs from that of quarantine, which is the detention of an individual who may have been exposed to a communicable disease until it is deemed certain that he has escaped infection. See quarantine.

Isolation is also a technique used in medicine and in biological research to maintain a germfree environment. See germfree life.