Q

Quality of Life
The overall enjoyment of life. In public health and in medicine, the concept of health-related quality of life (HRQOL) refers to a person or group’s perceived physical and mental health over time. Physicians have often used HRQOL to measure the effects of chronic (lasting a long time) illness in their patients to better understand how an illness interferes with a person’s day to day life.

Quarantine
The period of isolation decreed to control the spread of disease. Before the era of antibiotics, quarantine was one of the few available means of halting the spread of infectious disease. It is still employed today as needed. The list of quarantinable diseases in the United States is established by Executive Order of the President, on recommendation of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and includes:

• Cholera.
• Diphtheria.
• Infectious tuberculosis.
• Plague.
• Smallpox.
• Yellow fever, and viral hemorrhagic fevers (such as Marburg, Ebola, and Congo-Crimean disease).

In 2003, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) was added as a quarantinable disease. In 2005 another disease was added to the list, influenza caused by novel or reemergent influenza viruses that are causing, or have the potential to cause, a pandemic.

Quinine
Quinine is a medication that is used to treat malaria. Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite that lives part of its life in humans and part ofits life in mosquitoes.