Diseases Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
100 free Diseases trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every disease has a story, and the best ones are about people: the doctor who was laughed out of a conference for blaming mosquitoes, the sled dog whose 260-mile run saved a town, the president who hid his diagnosis, the queen who unknowingly passed a bleeding disorder to half the thrones of Europe. This quiz sticks to the history rather than the biology. Expect the discoverers and the dates, the scientists whose names became diagnoses, the vaccines that changed everything, the two diseases humanity has actually wiped out, and the famous patients whose illnesses made the news. Nothing here needs a medical degree, just a good memory and a taste for a surprising fact. It suits a family quiz night, a classroom warm-up or a pub round where everyone knows a little and nobody knows it all. Play it in one sitting or print it out for later.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Abraham Lincoln was coming down with smallpox when he gave which speech in November 1863?
The Gettysburg Address
The Gettysburg Address was followed by fever and a rash; his doctors called it mild 'varioloid', but a 2007 review argues he had full smallpox and they played it down.
Q 02Which Cambridge graduate, sent home by the plague of 1665, began his greatest discoveries at his Lincolnshire family home?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton later said a falling apple first gave him the notion of gravitation in those years, yet he published the theory only two decades later.
Q 03The viral 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge raised some $220 million worldwide for research into which disease?
ALS
ALS charities gained hugely, yet the challenge also drew criticism as a publicity stunt that wasted water.
Q 04Anne Frank is believed to have died at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945 of which louse-borne disease?
Typhus
Typhus killed Anne and her sister Margot in February or March 1945, only weeks before British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April.
Q 05Twenty dog-sled teams relayed diphtheria antitoxin almost 700 miles across Alaska in 1925 to save which town?
Nome
Nome got its serum after Togo's team ran the longest and most dangerous stretches, yet the fame went to Balto, who led the final leg.
Q 06Which nickname for Britons began as a jibe at Royal Navy sailors dosed against scurvy?
Limey
Limey is short for 'lime-juicer', yet switching the navy from lemons to colony-grown limes backfired: limes hold far less vitamin C.
Q 07Which star, diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1991, kept it secret until 1998?
Michael J. Fox
Michael J. Fox went public while starring in Spin City, left the show after one more season, and launched his Parkinson's research foundation in 2000.
Q 08Which former US president's centre has led the drive to wipe out Guinea worm disease since 1986?
Jimmy Carter
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.
Q 09The CDC was founded in 1946 in which US city, chosen because its first mission was fighting malaria in the South?
Atlanta
Atlanta already housed the wartime malaria-control office, so most of the new agency's scientists were entomologists and engineers rather than doctors.
Q 10Which US president announced his Alzheimer's diagnosis in a handwritten letter to the nation in 1994?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan went public hoping to raise awareness, noting that his and Nancy's open disclosures of their cancers had led many more people to get tested.
Q 11Which boxer, his arm trembling from Parkinson's, lit the cauldron at the 1996 Summer Olympics?
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali also received a replacement for his 1960 gold, long said to lie in the Ohio River, though he had told NBC's Dick Ebersol he simply lost it.
Q 12Which royal made headlines in 1987 by shaking hands with an AIDS patient to fight the stigma?
Princess Diana
Princess Diana did it while opening the UK's first specialist AIDS ward, at London's Middlesex Hospital, and was credited with dispelling the myth that the virus spread by touch.
Q 13Which NBA star stunned sport in November 1991 by announcing he had contracted HIV?
Magic Johnson
Q 21The first immortal human cell line, grown from a cervical cancer patient's tumour in 1951, is known by what name?
HeLa
HeLa cells came from Henrietta Lacks, whose tissue was taken without her consent; in 2021 her descendants sued a biotech company for profiting from them.
Q 22The haemophilia of Alexei, son of Tsar Nicholas II, gave which self-styled holy man his hold at court?
Rasputin
Rasputin seemed to ease Alexei's bleeding when doctors could not, but in 1916 a group of noblemen who feared his influence over the imperial family murdered him.
Q 23Which British queen spread the haemophilia dubbed the 'royal disease' into dynasties across Europe?
Victoria
Victoria passed on a disease whose type stayed unknown for generations, until scientists tested DNA from the remains of the Romanovs in 2009 and found it was the rarer haemophilia B.
Magic Johnson retired on the spot and won gold with the 1992 Dream Team, but dropped a planned NBA comeback when other players voiced fears about playing beside him.
Q 14Which oil, long spooned into reluctant children, was confirmed in the 1920s to prevent rickets?
Cod liver oil
Cod liver oil works because it is rich in vitamin D, which rickets sufferers lack; folk medicine had long favoured the oil before scientists found out why.
Q 15Which US president, his legs paralysed by illness in 1921, founded the charity that became the March of Dimes?
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt's foundation funded the research behind Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, then, with polio beaten in the US, turned its fight to birth defects and premature babies.
Q 16Which American folk singer died in 1967 of Huntington's disease, inherited from his mother?
Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie's doctors first blamed alcoholism or schizophrenia; only later was it found to be the disease that had put his mother in an institution.
Q 17Which priest, canonised in 2009, served Hawaii's Molokai leprosy colony from 1873 until his death in 1889?
Father Damien
Father Damien, a Belgian missionary, lived among the patients without separating himself, caught leprosy after years there, and kept working until it killed him.
Q 18A butterfly-shaped rash across the cheeks and nose is a classic sign of which autoimmune disease?
Lupus
Lupus is Latin for wolf, perhaps because early doctors thought its skin sores looked like a wolf's bite or like flesh being devoured.
Q 19Which virus, named after the Ugandan forest where it was found in 1947, was linked to a 2016 wave of birth defects?
Zika
Zika usually causes only mild symptoms, yet infection in pregnancy can cause microcephaly, and the WHO declared a global health emergency over it in February 2016.
Q 20Which nurse drew 'rose' diagrams showing that disease killed far more soldiers than battle wounds did?
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale blamed overcrowding and poor sanitation, and used her data to push the army and government to reform barracks and hospitals.
Q 24Which Romantic poet, once a surgeon-apothecary's apprentice, died young of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821?
John Keats
John Keats had been savaged by the Quarterly Review, and Shelley blamed his decline on the attacks, yet tuberculosis had already killed his mother.
Q 25Max Theiler won the 1951 Nobel Prize in Medicine for a 1937 vaccine against which mosquito-borne disease?
Yellow fever
Yellow fever infected Theiler himself during his lab work, yet the mild bout only made him immune; the disease had killed many other researchers.
Q 26Which British doctor found the malaria parasite inside a mosquito in India in 1897, earning the 1902 Nobel Prize?
Ross
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.
Q 27Which doctor argued in 1881 that a mosquito spread the disease Walter Reed's team confirmed in 1900?
Carlos Finlay
Carlos Finlay held to the idea through years of ridicule, and the Reed commission tested it with mosquitoes bred from Finlay's own laboratory stock.
Q 28British officials in colonial India mixed which bitter anti-malaria drug with soda and sugar, creating tonic water?
Quinine
Quinine from cinchona bark was so bitter that the British also mixed their tonic with gin, giving the world the gin and tonic.
Q 29Spain's 1803 Balmis Expedition kept the smallpox vaccine alive across the Atlantic by carrying it in whom?
Orphan boys
Orphan boys kept the vaccine alive by passing it from arm to arm, and the director of their orphanage sailed with them to look after them.
Q 30Apart from a CDC lab in the United States, the only site allowed to keep live smallpox virus is in which country?
Russia
Russia's Vector Institute holds one of the two official stocks; after a 1978 laboratory accident in Birmingham killed a woman, every other known sample was destroyed or handed over.