Malaria Trivia
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59 free Malaria trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Malaria has killed more humans than perhaps any other disease, and this trivia quiz covers the science, the history and the fight against it. The biology questions explain the Plasmodium life cycle, which species does the killing, why Anopheles is the only mosquito that matters, how sickle cell trait protects and why the parasite is so hard to vaccinate against. The history runs from Roman fever and the miasma that gave the disease its name to Laveran spotting the parasite in 1880, Ronald Ross's mosquito dissection of 1897 and the Italian team who proved human transmission a year later. The treatment questions cover cinchona bark and the Countess of Chinchón, the isolation of quinine, the gin and tonic, Bayer's chloroquine, Tu Youyou's rediscovery of artemisinin from a 4th-century Chinese text, and the two vaccines endorsed by the WHO. There are also questions on DDT, bednets, the eradication campaigns, World Malaria Day, the Panama Canal and the psychiatrist who won a Nobel Prize for deliberately infecting patients. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on malaria, its parasites, drugs and discoverers, and each question links to its source. Try our Vaccines and Infectious Diseases quizzes next.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Anopheles mosquitoes pass malaria parasites on to people?
Only the females
Only the females bite, because they need blood to nourish their eggs; males live on plant nectar, so they never carry the parasite from one person to the next.
Q 02The word malaria comes from Italian words meaning what?
Bad air
Bad air, or mala aria, got the blame because the fevers clustered around marshes; the mosquitoes that bred there were shown to be the real carriers only in the 1890s.
Q 03Which US health agency grew out of a wartime programme to control malaria around Southern military bases?
The CDC
The CDC opened in 1946 as the Communicable Disease Center, taking over from Malaria Control in War Areas, and it sits in Atlanta because malaria was then still common across the South.
Q 04DNA tests published in 2010 found malaria parasites in the mummy of which Egyptian pharaoh?
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun carried DNA from the deadliest malaria parasite, and the researchers suggested that an infection on top of a broken leg may have killed the boy king at 19.
Q 05Plasmodium knowlesi, a malaria parasite that spills over to people in Southeast Asia, normally infects which animals?
Macaques
Macaques are its natural hosts, and people who farm, hunt or log near the monkeys' forests are bitten by the same mosquitoes, making it a significant cause of malaria in Malaysian Borneo.
Q 06Symptoms of malaria usually begin how long after the infective bite?
10 to 15 days
10 to 15 days go by because the parasites first multiply in the liver without causing any symptoms; the fevers begin only once they break out into the blood.
Q 07Which organ commonly becomes enlarged during a malaria infection?
The spleen
The spleen swells because it filters infected red blood cells out of the circulation, which makes an enlarged spleen one of the classic signs doctors feel for.
Q 08What is the mobile form of the malaria parasite that a mosquito injects into a new host called?
Sporozoite
Sporozoites are injected with the mosquito's saliva and head for the liver, where they multiply before a different form of the parasite spills out into the blood.
Q 09What is the dormant liver stage called that lets some malaria parasites reactivate months after the first illness?
Hypnozoite
Hypnozoites survive the drugs that clear the blood, which is why P. vivax and P. ovale patients also need primaquine to stop the fevers coming back.
Q 10In 1809 'Walcheren fever', thought to be malaria mixed with other diseases, wrecked a British expedition against which ruler?
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte's garrisons barely had to fight: about a hundred British soldiers died in combat but roughly 4,000 of the fever, and the army gave up the swampy Dutch island within months.
Q 11Blackwater fever, a complication of severe malaria, takes its name from the dark colour of what?
The urine
The urine turns dark red or black as haemoglobin from burst red blood cells spills into it, and the condition can go on to kidney failure.
Q 12Roughly how many people caught malaria worldwide in 2024?
About 300 million
About 300 million: the WHO counted 282 million cases in 80 countries, roughly nine million more than the year before, and warned that drug resistance and funding cuts threaten two decades of gains.
Q 13Which African country had about a quarter of the world's malaria cases in 2024?
Nigeria
Nigeria had about 24% of the world's cases and 30% of the malaria deaths in 2024; with Africa's largest population, nearly all of it at risk, it carries more of the burden than any other country.
Q 21The first effective malaria treatment came from the bark of which tree?
Cinchona
Cinchona bark from the Andes holds quinine; Jesuit missionaries learned of the fever cure in Peru and carried it to Europe in the 1600s, where it was long known as Jesuit's bark.
Q 22In the 1670s Robert Talbor cured which English king's fever with a secret remedy that was really Jesuit's bark?
Charles II
Charles II made Talbor a royal physician and a knight, then lent him to France, where he cured the dauphin and Louis XIV bought the secret of the remedy.
Q 23Which insect repellent was developed for the US Army in the 1940s after its troops' experience of jungle warfare?
DEET
DEET entered military use in 1946 and went on public sale in 1957; it does not kill mosquitoes but is thought to scramble the sense of smell they use to find us.
Q 14Which inherited condition gives its carriers partial protection against malaria?
Sickle cell trait
Sickle cell trait means carrying one copy of the gene: it protects against malaria, which is why the gene stays common in malarial regions even though two copies cause sickle cell anaemia.
Q 15Vivax malaria is rare in much of Africa because most people there lack which blood-group marker?
Duffy
Duffy is the protein P. vivax uses as its doorway into red blood cells, so people without it are largely protected, though recent studies have found the parasite infecting some of them.
Q 16Alphonse Laveran won the 1907 Nobel Prize for showing that malaria and other diseases are caused by which organisms?
Protozoa
Protozoa were what Laveran saw moving inside soldiers' red blood cells in Algeria in 1880; his first reports were met with much scepticism before other scientists confirmed them.
Q 17In which Indian city did Ronald Ross show in 1898, using birds, that mosquito bites transmit malaria?
Calcutta
Calcutta is where Ross, unable to go on working with human patients, infected sparrows through mosquito bites and tracked the parasite to the insects' salivary glands.
Q 18Besides medicine, what else did Nobel laureate Ronald Ross do?
Wrote poems, novels and songs
Ross wrote poems, novels and songs, having wanted to be a writer rather than a doctor, and he even marked his 1897 mosquito discovery with a poem.
Q 19The Allies lost most of the world's quinine supply in 1942 when Japan seized the plantations of which island?
Java
Java's Dutch plantations were producing most of the world's supply, so its capture cut Allied armies off from their main malaria drug just as they began fighting in the Pacific.
Q 20Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay argued in 1881 that mosquitoes spread which disease, a theory confirmed two decades later?
Yellow fever
Yellow fever was his target: fellow doctors in Havana refused to accept his mosquito experiments until a US Army board proved the theory there in 1900.
Q 24Which decades-old malaria drug made headlines in 2020 when it was promoted, then found ineffective, as a COVID-19 treatment?
Hydroxychloroquine
Hydroxychloroquine, an old antimalarial also used for lupus, was tested on COVID-19 patients around the world until large trials showed it did not cut deaths, and the WHO halted its trial arm in July 2020.
Q 25British officers in which country are credited with inventing the gin and tonic?
India
India is where, by tradition, British officials tamed their bitter daily quinine with soda and sugar, then stirred in the gin they were already issued.
Q 26Chloroquine was first made in 1934, under the name resochin, at which German company's laboratories?
Bayer
Bayer's chemist Hans Andersag made it in 1934, but the firm judged it too toxic and set it aside for a decade, until wartime tests in America showed the verdict was wrong.
Q 27Where did chloroquine-resistant P. falciparum first appear in the 1950s?
Southeast Asia and South America
Southeast Asia and South America saw it first, on the Thai-Cambodian border and in Colombia; resistant parasites did not reach Africa until the late 1970s, then swept the continent.
Q 28Which herb, used in Chinese medicine for some 2,000 years, is the source of the malaria drug artemisinin?
Sweet wormwood
Sweet wormwood, or qinghao, was an old fever remedy; Tu Youyou's team screened hundreds of herbal recipes before its extract wiped out the parasites in mice in 1971.
Q 29Tu Youyou's herbal malaria extract only worked reliably once she stopped doing what to it?
Heating it
Heating it was destroying the active compound: a 4th-century handbook by Ge Hong said only to soak the herb and wring out the juice, so Tu switched to a low-temperature extraction.
Q 30Project 523, the secret Chinese programme that found artemisinin, began in 1967 after a plea for help from which ally?
North Vietnam
North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh asked China for help as drug-resistant malaria cut down his troops; the programme took its name from its launch date, 23 May 1967.