isolation, 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, in which the movement of an individual who may have been exposed to a communicable disease is restricted until it is deemed certain that the person has escaped infection.
Isolation is also a technique used in medicine and in biological research to maintain a germfree environment. See germfree life.