50 Fun Facts About Diseases

Abraham Lincoln was coming down with smallpox when he gave which famous speech in November 1863?

The Gettysburg Address was delivered while Lincoln was, modern clinicians believe, already incubating smallpox; a mild case with a rash followed within days.

Which Cambridge graduate, sent home by the plague of 1665, worked out gravity at Woolsthorpe?

Isaac Newton spent the two plague years at his family home developing calculus, optics and the law of gravitation, all before he turned 25.

The viral 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge raised $100 million in weeks for research into which disease?

ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, had been heard of by only half of Americans before the stunt, the ALS Association said. Monthly views of its Wikipedia page jumped from 163,000 to 2.89 million.

Anne Frank is believed to have died at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945 of which louse-borne disease?

Typhus swept Bergen-Belsen in an epidemic that killed some 17,000 prisoners, and witnesses recalled Anne and her sister Margot showing symptoms by February. Their exact date of death is unknown.

Which lead dog of musher Leonhard Seppala ran over 260 miles of the 1925 diphtheria serum relay to Nome?

Togo covered far more of the trail than any other lead dog, across its most treacherous stretches, yet the news went to Balto, who ran the final leg. A Disney film finally told his story in 2019.

Which nickname for Britons came from the Royal Navy adding citrus juice to sailors' grog against scurvy?

Limey began as 'lime-juicer' in the 1850s, a jibe at Royal Navy sailors. Switching from lemons to colony-grown limes was a blunder: limes hold only half the vitamin C.

Which Back to the Future star, diagnosed with Parkinson's in 1991, kept it secret until 1998?

Michael J. Fox was warned he had 'ten good working years left', so he hastily signed a three-film deal. In 2000 he founded a foundation to fund Parkinson's research.

Which former US president's centre has led the drive to wipe out Guinea worm disease since 1986?

Jimmy Carter's centre helped cut Guinea worm from an estimated 3.5 million cases a year in 1986 to just 14 in 2023. It would be only the second human disease ever eradicated.

The CDC was founded in 1946 in which US city, chosen because its first mission was fighting malaria in the South?

Atlanta got the Communicable Disease Center because malaria was endemic across the Southern United States. In 1947 Emory University sold the agency 15 acres for a token ten dollars.

Which US president announced his Alzheimer's diagnosis in a handwritten letter to the nation in 1994?

Ronald Reagan was diagnosed in August 1994 and went public that November, nearly six years after leaving office. He lived another decade, dying in 2004.

Which boxer, his arm trembling from Parkinson's, lit the cauldron at the 1996 Summer Olympics?

Muhammad Ali had made his Parkinson's diagnosis public in 1984, three years after his last fight. At those Games he was handed a replacement for the 1960 Olympic gold he said he had thrown into the Ohio River.

Which royal made headlines in 1987 by holding hands with an AIDS patient to fight the stigma?

Princess Diana had opened the UK's first dedicated AIDS unit, at London's Middlesex Hospital, that same year, and was named Woman of the Year 1987 for the effort.

Which Los Angeles Lakers star stunned sport in November 1991 by announcing he had contracted HIV?

Magic Johnson retired on the spot but returned within months to win MVP of the 1992 All-Star Game and co-captain the Olympic 'Dream Team' in Barcelona.

Which oil, long spooned into reluctant children, was confirmed in the 1920s to prevent rickets?

Cod liver oil works because it is rich in vitamin D, shown in 1920 to be what rickets sufferers lacked. German doctors had noticed as early as the 1820s that children given it stayed free of the disease.

Which US president, his legs paralysed by illness in 1921, founded the charity that became the March of Dimes?

Franklin Roosevelt launched it in 1938 as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to fight polio; comedian Eddie Cantor coined the catchier name as a pun on the newsreel The March of Time.

Which 'This Land Is Your Land' folk singer died in 1967 of Huntington's disease, inherited from his mother?

Woody Guthrie's mother had been institutionalised with the same disease while he was a teenager, and his first two daughters died of it too.

Which priest, canonised in 2009, served Hawaii's Molokai leprosy colony from 1873 until his death in 1889?

Father Damien, born Jozef De Veuster in Belgium, arrived at Kalaupapa to find 600 patients and caught leprosy himself after eleven years there. Pope Benedict XVI canonised him on 11 October 2009.

Lupus takes its name from the Latin for which animal, whose bite its rash was thought to resemble?

Wolf is 'lupus' in Latin, a name attached to the disease in the 13th century. Singer Selena Gomez is among its best-known sufferers today.

Zika virus, a global alarm in 2015-16, was first isolated in 1947 from a caged monkey in which country?

Uganda's Ziika Forest gave the virus its name after researchers isolated it from a caged rhesus macaque in April 1947. Human infection was not documented until 1952.

'Mad cow disease', or BSE, was first confirmed in cattle in 1986 in which country?

Britain saw more than 184,000 cattle diagnosed between 1986 and 2015, spread by feeding meat-and-bone meal to calves. Some countries long barred blood donors who had lived there in the 1980s and 90s.

The first immortal human cell line, grown from a cervical cancer patient's tumour in 1951, is known by what name?

HeLa cells came from Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old woman treated at Johns Hopkins who died of her cancer in October 1951; earlier human cultures had survived only days. Jonas Salk used them to test the first polio vaccine.

The haemophilia of Alexei, son of Tsar Nicholas II, gave which self-styled holy man his hold at court?

Grigori Rasputin began acting as the boy's faith healer in late 1906, and the empress's belief that he alone could ease Alexei's bleeding fed the scandals that helped bring down the Romanovs.

Which British queen, an unknowing carrier of haemophilia, passed the 'royal disease' to dynasties across Europe?

Queen Victoria spread the mutation through her daughters Alice and Beatrice into the royal houses of Spain and Germany, and on to the Romanovs. Tests on Romanov remains suggest it was the rarer haemophilia B.

Which Romantic poet, once a surgeon-apothecary's apprentice, died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821, aged 25?

John Keats had been in print for less than four years; Shelley loudly blamed his death on savage reviews in the Quarterly Review rather than on his lungs.

Max Theiler won the 1951 Nobel Prize in Medicine for a 1937 vaccine against which mosquito-borne disease?

Yellow fever made Theiler, born in South Africa, the first African-born Nobel laureate. His weakened '17D' strain, bred through more than 100 passages in chicken embryos, is still the basis of the vaccine.

Which British doctor found the malaria parasite inside a mosquito in India in 1897, earning the 1902 Nobel Prize?

Ronald Ross dissected mosquitoes in Secunderabad until, on 20 August 1897, he found the parasite in one insect's gut, proving that mosquitoes carried the disease. That date is now World Mosquito Day.

Which doctor argued in 1881 that a mosquito spread the disease Walter Reed's team confirmed in 1900?

Carlos Finlay presented the theory at the 1881 International Sanitary Conference and was met with ridicule and mockery. A year later he even named the culprit, a mosquito of the genus Aedes.

British officials in colonial India mixed which bitter anti-malaria drug with soda and sugar, creating tonic water?

Quinine from cinchona bark was so bitter that the British also mixed their tonic with gin, giving the world the gin and tonic. The first commercial tonic water was patented in London in 1858.

Spain's 1803 Balmis Expedition kept the smallpox vaccine alive across the Atlantic by carrying it in whom?

Orphan boys sailed with the expedition so the vaccine could be passed arm to arm; three enslaved girls from Cuba carried it for part of the route. Hundreds of thousands were vaccinated across the Spanish empire.

Apart from a CDC lab in the United States, the only site allowed to keep live smallpox virus is in which country?

Russia's Vector Institute at Koltsovo and the CDC hold the last two official stocks, kept after the WHO had every other sample destroyed or handed over. Debate over destroying even these has run for decades.

Which US city vaccinated six million people against smallpox in spring 1947 after a traveller arrived from Mexico?

New York gave 6,350,000 vaccinations in March and April, five million of them within two weeks, and the outbreak was held to 12 cases and two deaths.

Maurice Hilleman's mumps vaccine, still used today, was grown from a virus he took from whom when they fell ill in 1963?

His daughter Jeryl Lynn gave her name to the strain that remains the basis of the vaccine. Hilleman's team developed eight of the 14 vaccines routinely given to American children.

Which British medical journal retracted Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism?

The Lancet withdrew the paper in February 2010 after a Sunday Times investigation by Brian Deer, and Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register three months later.

Fleming found penicillin in 1928, but Howard Florey's team made it a usable drug a decade later at which university?

Oxford's Dunn School treated its first patient, a local police constable, in 1941; he rallied, then died when the supply ran out. Florey shared the 1945 Nobel with Fleming and Ernst Chain.

Which US president's Addison's disease, diagnosed in London in 1947, was revealed only years after his death?

John F. Kennedy was diagnosed at 30, during his first term in Congress, by Sir Daniel Davis at The London Clinic.

Christiaan Eijkman's Nobel-winning clue to beriberi came when his lab chickens fell ill on a diet of what?

Polished rice lacked what Eijkman called the 'anti-beriberi factor', later identified as thiamine, vitamin B1; the birds recovered within days on unpolished rice. He shared the 1929 Nobel for the discovery of vitamins.

Which drug, isolated in Selman Waksman's lab in 1943, became the first antibiotic cure for tuberculosis?

Streptomycin was actually isolated by Waksman's graduate student Albert Schatz from a soil bacterium, yet only Waksman received the 1952 Nobel Prize for it.

James Parkinson first described the disease later named after him in an 1817 work, 'An Essay on the' what?

Shaking Palsy was Parkinson's term for what he called paralysis agitans, based on three patients of his own and three people he watched in the street. Jean-Martin Charcot later renamed it Parkinson's disease.

Which Tudor queen survived smallpox in 1562, which left her scarred, half bald and reliant on wigs?

Elizabeth I's brush with death, with no heir named, set off a heated succession debate in Parliament that same year.

Which Italian anatomist isolated the cholera bacterium in 1854, thirty years before a German got the credit?

Filippo Pacini found the comma-shaped bacillus during autopsies of cholera victims and called it a Vibrio, but his work was ignored in an age that blamed bad air.

Rinderpest, the cattle plague eradicated in 2011, had its last confirmed case in 2001 in which African country?

Kenya's 2001 case closed a campaign that made rinderpest only the second disease in history to be fully wiped out, after smallpox; the FAO made it official in June 2011.

Which WHO doctor identified SARS as a new disease in Hanoi in 2003, then died of it within weeks?

Carlo Urbani's early warning triggered a global response credited with saving many lives; he fell ill on a flight to Bangkok in March 2003 and died on 29 March.

The hantavirus behind the 1993 Four Corners outbreak was finally named 'Sin Nombre', Spanish for what?

Without a name was where it landed after the first choice, Muerto Canyon virus, tied the disease to a place near the outbreak. It is spread by the western deer mouse.

Timothy Ray Brown, cured of HIV by a 2007 stem-cell transplant for leukaemia, was known by what nickname?

The Berlin Patient label preserved his anonymity when the cure was announced at a 2008 conference; his donor carried two copies of a rare CCR5 mutation that blocks HIV from entering cells.

Which 13-year-old in Toronto became, in January 1922, the first patient given Banting and Best's pancreatic extract?

Leonard Thompson's first dose caused an allergic reaction from impurities; a purer batch twelve days later rapidly restored his health, and he lived to 26.

Kuru, the prion disease spread by funeral rites among the Fore people, was studied from the 1950s in which country?

Papua New Guinea's Fore people consumed the bodies of relatives at funerals to free the spirit, and women and children, who ate the brain, were hit hardest. The name comes from a Fore word for 'to shake'.

The high-yield mould behind mass-produced penicillin was found in 1943 at a Peoria, Illinois market, growing on what?

A mouldy cantaloupe yielded the Penicillium strain that, grown in corn steep liquor, became the principal commercial source of penicillin G after a worldwide search.

Which US president launched the 'war on cancer' by signing the National Cancer Act on 23 December 1971?

Richard Nixon's law aimed to find a cure through a surge in research funding, and half a century on the 'war' is still being fought.

Whose landmark report of 11 January 1964 first told Americans officially that smoking causes lung cancer?

The Surgeon General's committee reviewed more than 7,000 studies before concluding that smoking caused lung cancer and chronic bronchitis. The UK's Royal College of Physicians had said as much in 1962.

On which date in 2020 did the WHO declare COVID-19 a pandemic, six weeks after calling it a global emergency?

11 March 2020 was the day the WHO assessed the outbreak as a pandemic, having declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January.