Cordon Sanitaire (Medicine)

A cordon sanitaire is the restriction of movement of people into or out of a defined geographic area, such as a community, region, or country, originally used as a barrier to stop the spread of infectious disease. The same term is also used metaphorically in English for efforts to contain the spread of an ideology considered unwanted or dangerous, such as George F. Kennan's containment policy toward the Soviet Union, but the medical sense described here is the disease control measure itself.