Cholera Trivia
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50 free Cholera trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This cholera trivia quiz covers the disease that killed tens of millions in the 19th century and still kills tens of thousands a year. The easy questions ask what kind of organism causes it, how it spreads, why it was called the 'blue death', which London doctor traced an outbreak to a water pump and what simple treatment saves most patients today. From there it moves through the seven pandemics, the scientists who isolated the bacterium, the vaccine pioneers and the modern outbreaks in Haiti, Yemen and Zimbabwe. The hard end is for people who have read The Ghost Map: the brewery workers who escaped the Soho outbreak, the nappy that started it, the two water companies Snow compared, the Italian whose 1854 discovery was ignored for a century, the Bengali doctor who published oral rehydration in The Lancet in 1953, the Russian riots against 'poisoning' doctors, the president and the physicist who died of it, and the composer whose death may or may not have been cholera at all. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on cholera, John Snow, the 1854 Broad Street outbreak, Vibrio cholerae, Filippo Pacini, Robert Koch, oral rehydration therapy, cholera vaccines, the Haiti and Yemen outbreaks and Love in the Time of Cholera before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our medicine, pandemics and Victorian London quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cholera is an infection of the small intestine caused by what kind of organism?
A bacterium
Vibrio cholerae is comma-shaped, Gram-negative and has a single flagellum for swimming.
Q 02Cholera spreads mostly through what?
Water and food contaminated with human faeces
Humans are the only known host, and undercooked shellfish is a common source because the bacteria accumulate in plankton.
Q 03Cholera was nicknamed the 'blue death' because of what effect on patients?
Their skin turned bluish-grey from fluid loss
Untreated, a patient can lose 10 to 20 litres of 'rice-water' diarrhoea a day.
Q 04What is the primary treatment for cholera?
Oral rehydration salts
Slightly sweet and salty solutions, ideally rice-based, replace lost fluids; zinc helps children and IV fluids are used in severe cases.
Q 05Which London physician showed in 1854 that cholera spread through contaminated water, earning the title 'Father of Epidemiology'?
John Snow
He had proposed a microbial origin for cholera in 1849, decades before germ theory was accepted.
Q 06The doctor investigating the 1854 Soho outbreak persuaded the local council to do what to the Broad Street water pump?
Removing its handle
Officials quietly put the handle back once the epidemic subsided; the street is now Broadwick Street.
Q 07How many people died in the 1854 Broad Street outbreak?
616
Snow's dot map of the cases clustered around the pump became one of the founding documents of epidemiology.
Q 08Why did none of the workers at the Broad Street brewery catch cholera during the 1854 outbreak?
They drank a daily allowance of beer instead of well water
Brewing involves boiling the water, which killed the bacteria; the workhouse next door had its own well and was also spared.
Q 09The Broad Street well was contaminated by an old cesspit into which water from washing what had drained?
A sick baby's nappies
The Reverend Henry Whitehead's door-to-door interviews helped Snow trace the index case.
Q 10Which clergyman helped Snow by interviewing Soho residents, initially hoping to disprove his theory?
Henry Whitehead
Steven Johnson's book The Ghost Map centres on the unlikely partnership of the doctor and the curate.
Q 11Snow's 'grand experiment' compared households served by two water companies. Customers of the polluted one had a cholera rate how many times higher?
Fourteen
Southwark and Vauxhall drew from sewage-polluted stretches of the Thames; Lambeth Waterworks took cleaner water upriver at Seething Wells.
Q 12Apart from cholera, the Broad Street investigator is famous for giving which monarch chloroform during childbirth?
Queen Victoria
He administered it with a cloth over her face for the birth of Prince Leopold, helping make anaesthesia respectable.
Q 13The theory Snow argued against held that cholera was caused by 'miasma'. What was miasma supposed to be?
Noxious 'bad air'
Q 21The third pandemic reached North America via Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine, arriving first at which city?
Quebec
The fourth pandemic entered the United States through New Orleans in 1873 and spread up the Mississippi.
Q 22An 1892 outbreak in which German port city killed more than 8,600 people?
Hamburg
It was one of the last great cholera epidemics in Western Europe.
Q 23Between 1847 and 1851, roughly how many people died of cholera in Russia alone?
More than one million
Cholera riots had already broken out in Russia in 1830–31, when mobs accused doctors of poisoning the poor.
Belief in miasma led to remedies like flannel 'cholera belts' to keep the abdomen warm.
Q 14Which Italian anatomist isolated the cholera microbe in 1854, though his work went largely unnoticed?
Filippo Pacini
In 1965 the international nomenclature committee formally named the organism Vibrio cholerae Pacini 1854 in his honour.
Q 15Which German scientist identified Vibrio cholerae under the microscope in 1883 as the cause of the disease?
Robert Koch
He was sent first to Alexandria in Egypt and then to Calcutta, where the outbreak was worse.
Q 16Vibrio cholerae has what distinctive shape?
Comma-shaped
Koch described the 'comma bacilli' he found in patients' intestines.
Q 17Cholera toxin causes massive fluid loss by locking an enzyme in the active state and raising levels of which molecule in gut cells?
cAMP
It does this by ADP-ribosylating a G protein subunit, so the cells pump out chloride and water without stopping.
Q 18How many cholera pandemics have been recorded since the early 19th century?
Seven
The first spread from Bengal in 1817; the seventh began in Indonesia in 1961 and has never really ended.
Q 19The seventh cholera pandemic began in 1961 in which country?
Indonesia
It brought a new strain nicknamed El Tor, which has persisted in developing countries for decades.
Q 20The first cholera pandemic began in 1817 in which region of India?
Bengal
British Army and Navy ships helped carry it around the Indian Ocean rim, from Africa to Indonesia and on to China and Japan.
Q 24The word 'cholera' derives from the Greek 'kholē', meaning what?
Bile
European doctors long used 'cholera' for any yellow diarrhoea, so the Indian disease was called 'Asiatic cholera' to distinguish it.
Q 25Ships with cholera aboard traditionally flew a quarantine flag of which colour?
Yellow
Nobody aboard could go ashore for 30 to 40 days.
Q 26Which Bengali scientist first demonstrated in a 1953 Lancet paper that a drink of salt and glucose in water could treat cholera?
Hemendra Nath Chatterjee
His mix was 4 g of salt and 25 g of glucose in a litre of water; De separately discovered the cholera toxin.
Q 27Oral rehydration therapy proved itself on a mass scale in 1971 among refugees from which conflict?
The Bangladesh Liberation War
Millions were displaced and cholera swept the camps; ORS cut death rates dramatically.
Q 28In 1892 Waldemar Haffkine developed an improved cholera vaccine and first tested it on whom?
Himself
He then tested it on more than 40,000 people around Calcutta between 1893 and 1896.
Q 29The 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti, ten months after the earthquake, was traced to a base of UN peacekeepers from which country?
Nepal
Around 820,000 Haitians were infected and nearly 10,000 died; the UN's Ban Ki-moon finally apologised in December 2016.
Q 30The suspected source of the Haiti outbreak was which river, from which most early victims had drunk?
The Artibonite
It flows past the peacekeepers' base at Mirebalais.