Two weeks gives the necessary time for them to determine whether or not they will become ill and become contagious to others. Other uses U.S. President John F. Kennedy euphemistically referred to the U.S. Navy's interdiction of shipping en route to Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis as a "quarantine" rather than a blockade, because a quarantine is a legal act in peacetime, whereas a blockade is defined as an act of aggression under the U.N. Charter. In computer science, "quarantining" describes putting files infected by computer viruses into a special directory, so as to eliminate the threat they pose, without irreversibly deleting them. The Spanish term for quarantine, (la) cuarentena, refers also to the period of postpartum confinement in which a new mother and her baby are sheltered from the outside world. See also , a former quarantine station in Albany, Western Australia Notes References Sources Further reading External links – Hardback ; paperback Emerging Infectious Diseases – Contents, Volume 11, Number 2 , February 2005 Quarantine for SARS, Taiwan , February 2005, wwwnc.cdc.gov History of quarantine (from PBS NOVA) Quarantine facilities Infectious diseases Prevention