Ebola Trivia
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60 free Ebola trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Ebola trivia quiz covers the disease from the laboratory to the headlines. The science questions ask how the virus is built and how it spreads: the filament shape, the fruit bats thought to be its reservoir, the six known ebolaviruses and the four that make people sick, the incubation window, the fatality range, and the immune tricks that let it run so fast. The history questions go back to the two 1976 outbreaks in Sudan and Zaire, the river that gave the disease its name, and the scientists who identified it. From there it moves through the West African epidemic of 2013-16 (the child in Meliandou, the numbers, the cases in Dallas, Madrid, New York and Glasgow, Time's Person of the Year), the Reston monkey-house scare that inspired The Hot Zone, the Kivu outbreak in a war zone, and the vaccine and antibody treatments that finally changed the odds. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. For related topics, try our Pandemics, Human Body and Medicine quizzes.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ebola is named after a river in which present-day country?
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Democratic Republic of the Congo: the virus surfaced in 1976 at the village of Yambuku, but the scientists who identified it named it after a river some distance away so the village would not carry the stigma.
Q 02Which animals are believed to be the natural host of ebolaviruses?
Fruit bats
Fruit bats are the leading suspect, though the reservoir has never been confirmed; the other wild animals that pass the virus to people tend to die of it themselves.
Q 03Which antiviral, tested against Ebola in Congo in 2019, became the first drug the US approved to treat COVID-19?
Remdesivir
Remdesivir was dropped from the Congo trial when two rival treatments saved more patients, then found its use a year later: in October 2020 it became the first COVID-19 treatment to win US approval.
Q 04The first victim of the 1976 Yambuku outbreak, a village headmaster, was at first treated for which disease?
Malaria
Malaria was the natural guess for a fever in the tropics, and Ebola's first symptoms still mimic it so closely that only a laboratory test can tell the two apart.
Q 05What is Ebola's maximum incubation period, the standard monitoring window for contacts?
21 days
21 days is the accepted outer limit for symptoms to appear, so the WHO doubles it for safety: an outbreak is declared over only after 42 days with no new cases.
Q 06How does Ebola spread between people?
Direct contact with body fluids
Direct contact with body fluids is needed, and only once a person has symptoms, which is why caregivers and those who prepare the dead for burial are hit hardest; airborne spread between people has never been documented.
Q 07Ebola virions are filamentous particles that may appear in the shape of what?
A shepherd's crook
A shepherd's crook is one of the bends these long threads take, and the thread shape names the whole family: filovirus comes from the Latin filum, 'thread'.
Q 08Roughly how many genes does the Ebola virus carry?
7
7 genes are all it has, yet two of them are enough to jam the interferon signals an infected cell uses to call for help.
Q 09Ebolaviruses are most closely related to which other group of haemorrhagic fever viruses?
Marburgviruses
Marburgviruses are named after the German town where laboratory workers caught the first known cases from imported monkeys in 1967; the first Ebola samples of 1976 were at first mistaken for Marburg.
Q 10Which ebolavirus is considered the most dangerous and responsible for the most outbreaks?
Zaire virus
Zaire virus is the deadliest of the six and has caused more outbreaks than any other, which is why the licensed vaccines and drugs all target it alone.
Q 11Which two ebolaviruses are thought to be harmless to people?
Reston and Bombali
Reston and Bombali are the exceptions: people exposed to Reston virus have made antibodies to it without ever falling ill, and Bombali has not been shown to cause disease in anyone.
Q 12ZMapp, an experimental Ebola drug tested in Congo's 2018-19 trial, was manufactured inside which plants?
Tobacco plants
Tobacco plants in Kentucky greenhouses did the work: each was infected with a carrier virus bearing the drug's genes, then harvested so the medicine could be extracted and purified.
Q 13Which type of immune cell is among the first that Ebola virus infects?
Macrophages
Q 21The 1976 Sudan outbreak began with a storekeeper at a factory in the town of Nzara that processed what?
Cotton
Cotton workers at the Nzara factory began falling ill in late June 1976, two months before Yambuku's first case, yet health authorities learned of the outbreak only that September.
Q 22The reference strain of Ebola virus used in laboratories, 'Mayinga', is named after which victim of the 1976 outbreak?
A hospital nurse
A hospital nurse: Mayinga N'Seka caught the virus in Kinshasa while caring for a nun flown in from Yambuku, before anyone knew what precautions the new disease demanded.
Q 23Which island nation pledged 165 doctors and nurses to West Africa's Ebola zone in September 2014?
Cuba
Macrophages, scavenger cells meant to engulf invaders, are hijacked instead: once infected they carry the virus to the lymph nodes, where it multiplies before spreading through the body.
Q 14In which body fluid can Ebola virus persist for more than a year after a survivor recovers?
Semen
Semen can carry the virus long after blood tests come back clear, so the WHO offers male survivors monthly testing and advises safer sex until two results in a row are negative.
Q 15In May 2014 Ebola reached a third West African country through mourners at the burial of which local figure?
A traditional healer
A traditional healer had treated sick patients who crossed the border seeking her care; she died of the virus, and the women who attended her burial became that country's first chain of cases.
Q 16Which farm animal can transmit Ebola to primates without contact, as the virus concentrates in its lungs?
Pigs
Pigs infected in a 2012 experiment passed the virus to monkeys caged in the same room without ever touching them; when the same set-up was tried from monkey to monkey, it never spread.
Q 17Peter Piot, who helped identify the Ebola virus in 1976, went on to become the founding head of which global health body?
UNAIDS
UNAIDS: the 1976 outbreak turned Piot towards the AIDS epidemic then emerging in Africa, and he went on to lead the UN's joint programme against it from its creation.
Q 18How did nuns at Yambuku's mission hospital unwittingly spread Ebola in 1976?
Reusing unsterilised needles for vitamin injections
Reusing unsterilised needles for vitamin injections was the cause Peter Piot's team uncovered: each morning the clinic was issued just five syringes, used on patient after patient.
Q 19In 1976 the blood sample that revealed Ebola flew from Kinshasa to Europe on a commercial flight, packed in what?
A Thermos flask
A Thermos flask of melting ice held the vials, and one had broken on the way; the scientists who opened it wore only lab coats and gloves, unaware of what had leaked into the water.
Q 20The nuns who ran Yambuku's mission hospital when Ebola struck in 1976 came from which European country?
Belgium
Belgium: Yambuku lay in what had been the Belgian Congo, so when word of the sisters' deaths reached home the government sent investigators, among them a 27-year-old volunteer named Peter Piot.
Cuba's team went for six months at a stretch, drawn from a state programme that has long posted the island's doctors and nurses to poorer countries.
Q 24In which country was a new ebolavirus species identified during a 2007 outbreak?
Uganda
Uganda's Bundibugyo district gave the new virus its name, and in that first outbreak it proved milder than its cousins: fewer than half of those infected died, where earlier outbreaks had killed up to nine in ten.
Q 25How did a Russian laboratory worker catch a fatal case of Ebola in 2004?
A needle-stick injury
A needle-stick injury: she was helping to develop an Ebola vaccine when she accidentally injected herself with the virus it was meant to stop.
Q 26The 2013-16 West African epidemic was traced to a toddler who died in December 2013 in which country?
Guinea
Guinea's remote village of Meliandou, near the point where three countries meet, was the starting point; the virus then spread for more than three months before anyone identified it as Ebola.
Q 27Roughly how many people were infected in the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014 to 2016?
About 28,000
About 28,000 cases were reported, with more than 11,000 deaths; earlier outbreaks had burned out in remote villages, but this time the virus reached crowded capital cities.
Q 28Which 1980s charity single returned in 2014 for Ebola relief?
Do They Know It's Christmas?
Do They Know It's Christmas? returned as Band Aid 30 after the United Nations asked Bob Geldof for help, with its lines about feeding the hungry rewritten for the new crisis.
Q 29In August 2014 the WHO said an 'unprecedented' number of which group had caught Ebola?
Health workers
Health workers were short of protective gear and far too few for the caseload, and each doctor or nurse who died left the response weaker.
Q 30Whom did Time magazine name Person of the Year for 2014?
The Ebola fighters
The Ebola fighters shared the title; one cover showed Salome Karwah, a Liberian who lost both parents to the virus, survived it herself and went back to her clinic to care for other patients.