HIV and AIDS Trivia
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98 free HIV and AIDS trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
HIV and AIDS have shaped four decades of science, politics and culture: a virus that hid in people for years before anyone knew it existed, a diagnosis that was once a death sentence and is now a manageable condition, and a stigma that activists, artists and a few brave public figures spent their lives dismantling. Every question here is one of those turning points. The 98 questions run from the first official reports of the early 1980s, through the discovery of the virus and the race for a test and a treatment, to the combination therapies that changed everything and the injections now preventing infection outright. Along the way they cover how the virus actually spreads and how it does not, the symbols and days of remembrance, the plays, films and musicians that brought the epidemic into the open, and the numbers that describe the pandemic today. It suits a World AIDS Day event, a health or biology classroom, a pub quiz round with some substance, or anyone who wants to check what they really know against the facts. Play it on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for the room.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which rock frontman confirmed he had AIDS in a statement issued the day before he died in 1991?
Freddie Mercury
Freddie Mercury died of bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS on 24 November 1991, and the next April his bandmates staged a Wembley tribute concert that launched the Mercury Phoenix Trust.
Q 02Timothy Ray Brown, the first person cured of HIV after a 2007 stem-cell transplant, was known by what nickname?
The Berlin Patient
The Berlin Patient got his name at a 2008 conference to protect his anonymity; his donor carried a rare inherited variant that stops HIV attaching to cells. He went public in 2010, saying he did not want to be the only person cured.
Q 03A persistent myth wrongly blames which body fluid for spreading HIV?
Saliva
Saliva, sweat and tears carry no risk unless visibly contaminated with blood, and no insect can transmit the virus either; the routes that matter are sex, shared needles, transfusions and mother-to-child.
Q 04Which science fiction novelist's 1992 death from HIV, caught via a 1983 transfusion, stayed a family secret until 2002?
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov's family hid the cause of his death for fear that anti-AIDS prejudice would extend to them; the virus came from a blood transfusion during triple bypass surgery, and his widow Janet finally revealed it in his autobiography.
Q 05Which royal opened the UK's first dedicated AIDS ward in 1987 and held a patient's hand to challenge the stigma?
Princess Diana
Princess Diana's gesture at London's Middlesex Hospital made front pages at a time when many believed the virus spread by touch, and she returned in 1991 to hug a patient.
Q 06The red AIDS ribbon of 1991 was modelled on ribbons of which colour, then displayed for Gulf War troops?
Yellow
Yellow ribbons honouring US troops in the Gulf inspired the Visual AIDS artists, who chose red for its link to blood and passion; Jeremy Irons wore one of the first at the 1991 Tony Awards.
Q 07World AIDS Day, proposed by two WHO press officers and first held in 1988, falls on which date?
1 December
1 December was picked by James Bunn, a former TV journalist, because it fell after the US elections but before Christmas, maximising news coverage. It has been observed every year since 1988.
Q 08Which star of Pillow Talk, a friend of the Reagans, became in 1985 the first major US celebrity to die of AIDS?
Rock Hudson
Rock Hudson's disclosure more than doubled private donations to AIDS research, and shortly before his death he gave $250,000 to help launch amfAR. His friend Ronald Reagan did not mention AIDS publicly until that September.
Q 09Tom Hanks won his first Oscar as a lawyer with AIDS suing the firm that fired him in which 1993 film?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia also won Bruce Springsteen an Oscar for 'Streets of Philadelphia', and it was among the first mainstream Hollywood films to confront HIV/AIDS and homophobia, with Denzel Washington as the reluctant lawyer who takes the case.
Q 10HIV mainly infects which type of white blood cell, whose falling count doctors use to stage the infection?
CD4 T cells
CD4 T cells act as the immune system's coordinators, releasing cytokines that direct other immune cells, so losing them leaves the body open to infections it would normally shrug off.
Q 11As of 2023, which country had more people living with HIV than any other?
South Africa
South Africa's government stalled on antiretroviral drugs in the early 2000s, yet by the mid-2010s the country had built the world's largest HIV treatment programme.
Q 12Which Paris institute isolated the virus behind AIDS in 1983, earning two of its scientists a 2008 Nobel Prize?
Institut Pasteur
Institut Pasteur researchers Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, while the American lab that claimed co-discovery was left out. They first called the virus LAV.
Q 13What does PrEP stand for, the daily pill regimen the FDA first approved in 2012 to prevent HIV infection?
Q 21Which Wimbledon champion announced in 1992 that he had contracted HIV from a transfusion during heart bypass surgery?
Arthur Ashe
Arthur Ashe went public only to pre-empt a USA Today story about his illness, then founded a foundation for the defeat of AIDS before dying in 1993; the US Open's main stadium now carries his name.
Q 22Which enzyme lets HIV copy its RNA genome into DNA, the error-prone step that drives its rapid mutation?
Reverse transcriptase
Reverse transcriptase has no proofreading ability, so it makes errors every time it copies the genome — the reason HIV mutates so fast and why single drugs quickly lose their grip. Hepatitis B uses the same trick.
Q 23The pandemic strain of HIV-1 crossed into humans in southern Cameroon from a virus carried by which animal?
Pre-exposure prophylaxis
Pre-exposure prophylaxis with the pill Truvada, a combination of emtricitabine and tenofovir, offers around 99% protection when taken every day.
Q 14The CDC's first report of what became AIDS, in June 1981, described a rare pneumonia in five men in which city?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles doctors had seen Pneumocystis pneumonia, a fungal infection previously confined to severely immunosuppressed patients, in five previously healthy young men who all had other unusual infections as well.
Q 15Which acronym, soon dropped as misleading, did US doctors briefly apply to the syndrome in 1982 before 'AIDS'?
GRID
GRID stood for 'gay-related immune deficiency', a label dropped within months once the same infections appeared in patients who were not gay men, and the CDC adopted 'AIDS' that September.
Q 16Ryan White, the Indiana teenager barred from school after contracting HIV from a blood product, had which condition?
Haemophilia
Haemophilia treatment with pooled factor VIII infected nearly 90% of haemophiliacs treated between 1979 and 1984 with HIV or hepatitis C, and Congress passed the Ryan White CARE Act four months after his death in 1990.
Q 17Which drug, shelved in the 1960s as a failed cancer treatment, became the first approved HIV antiretroviral in 1987?
AZT
AZT was synthesised in 1964 under a cancer grant and shelved after proving inert in mice; it went from first lab test against HIV to approval in just 25 months. Its early dose was 400 mg every four hours, day and night.
Q 18Which group, formed by 300 New Yorkers two days after a 1987 speech, protested under the slogan 'Silence = Death'?
ACT UP
ACT UP's first action, two weeks after it formed, saw 250 members block Wall Street to demand access to experimental AIDS drugs; the pink-triangle 'Silence = Death' poster came from a separate art collective.
Q 19Cleve Jones's NAMES Project, begun in San Francisco in 1987 with panels the size of a grave, takes what form?
A quilt
A quilt was what Jones saw when mourners taped name placards to a federal building in 1985, and it has grown to roughly 50,000 panels honouring more than 110,000 people.
Q 20Which Hollywood star served as founding national chairman of amfAR, formed in September 1985?
Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor's West Coast foundation merged with Mathilde Krim's New York group to form amfAR, and in 1991 she launched her own AIDS foundation, paying its overheads herself so donations went straight to care.
Chimpanzee
Chimpanzee SIV jumped the species barrier at least twice, producing HIV-1 groups M and N; only group M went pandemic, while the rare groups O and P came from gorillas and HIV-2 descends from a monkey, the sooty mangabey.
Q 24Genetic studies trace the pandemic HIV-1 strain to the 1920s in which Congo River city, then called Léopoldville?
Kinshasa
Kinshasa's colonial railways, a million travellers a year and unsterilised clinic needles let the virus spread for decades unnoticed; a 1959 blood sample from the city holds one of the earliest known HIV infections.
Q 25In the 'U=U' message launched by the Prevention Access Campaign in 2016, an undetectable viral load means HIV is what?
Untransmittable
Untransmittable means a person on effective treatment cannot pass HIV on sexually, a finding proven in trials of thousands of couples and endorsed by the WHO.
Q 26The multi-drug regimen unveiled at the 1996 International AIDS Conference, which made HIV survivable, has what acronym?
HAART
HAART combines drugs that hit different viral targets at once, so the virus cannot mutate around all of them; typical regimens pair two nucleoside drugs as a backbone with a third from another class.
Q 27Which AIDS researcher, a pioneer of combination antiretroviral therapy, was Time magazine's Man of the Year for 1996?
David Ho
David Ho's team showed for the first time that combination therapy could durably suppress HIV replication, and his 'hit early, hit hard' approach turned a terminal diagnosis into a chronic, manageable one.
Q 28PEP, the emergency course of anti-HIV drugs taken after a possible exposure, must start within what time window?
72 hours
72 hours is the cut-off because after that PEP is much less effective and may not work at all; the sooner the course starts after a needle-stick or a burst condom, the better it protects.
Q 29Two copies of a 32-base-pair deletion in which gene, carried by about 1% of Europeans, give strong resistance to HIV-1?
CCR5
CCR5 is the doorway HIV-1 uses to enter immune cells, and people with two copies of the deletion simply lack it; the trade-off may be greater vulnerability to some mosquito-borne and tick-borne viruses.
Q 30Which cancer, marked by purple skin lesions, was among the first illnesses tied to AIDS when cases surfaced in 1981?
Kaposi's sarcoma
Kaposi's sarcoma is caused by a herpesvirus, HHV-8, that a healthy immune system keeps in check, which is why the once-rare tumour exploded among people whose immunity had collapsed.