Polio Trivia
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59 free Polio trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Polio terrified parents for half a century and was then beaten back to a handful of cases a year by two rival vaccines. This quiz covers the disease itself first: what the word poliomyelitis means, how the virus spreads, why three-quarters of infections show no symptoms at all, the three serotypes, the paralysis that gave it the name infantile paralysis, and the iron lungs that filled hospital wards in the 1940s and 1950s. The second half is the human story. Franklin Roosevelt's illness at Campobello and his rehabilitation centre at Warm Springs, Eddie Cantor's March of Dimes, the 1952 US epidemic, Jonas Salk's killed vaccine and "could you patent the sun?", the Cutter incident, Albert Sabin's oral drops on sugar cubes and his Soviet trials, and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative that has cut wild polio from 350,000 cases in 1988 to a few dozen. Easy questions suit anyone who has heard of Salk; the expert tier asks about serotypes, dates and the scientists who never got famous. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on polio, the polio vaccine, Salk, Sabin, the iron lung and the March of Dimes, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on vaccines, medicine and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which film director was bedridden with polio as a boy and passed the time staging puppet shows?
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola soon went from puppets to pictures: while still a schoolboy he began making his own 8mm films.
Q 02What do most people infected with poliovirus experience?
No symptoms
No symptoms: roughly seven in ten infections pass unnoticed, yet those people still shed the virus for weeks, which let polio move silently from house to house.
Q 03Because poliovirus has no animal reservoir, it could become the second human disease ever eradicated, after which one?
Smallpox
Smallpox's last natural case, a Somali hospital cook named Ali Maow Maalin, recovered and spent years as a polio vaccinator, telling wary parents his own story.
Q 04What is the main route by which polio spreads from person to person?
Fecal-oral
Fecal-oral: because infected people shed the virus in stool, health agencies now test sewage to catch polio circulating in a city before anyone is paralysed.
Q 05Which singer took his polio shot in front of news cameras in 1956?
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley rolled up his sleeve at a television studio before going on air, recruited because so few teenagers were getting the new vaccine.
Q 06Karl Landsteiner, who helped identify the virus behind polio, is best remembered for discovering what?
Blood groups
Blood groups made his name in 1901; his polio proof came from grinding up the spinal cord of a child who had died of it and passing the disease to laboratory animals.
Q 07In October 2023, wild poliovirus was still endemic in which two countries?
Pakistan and Afghanistan
Pakistan and Afghanistan are treated by health agencies as one epidemiological block: families crossing their long shared border keep carrying the virus from one country to the other.
Q 08The Greek root polios in the word poliomyelitis means what?
Grey
Grey: joined with myelos, marrow, it describes the inflamed grey matter of the spinal cord, the damage that causes the paralysis.
Q 09Which country found the last wild type 2 poliovirus case, in 1999?
India
India's city of Aligarh reported that final type 2 case; the strain, one of three, was declared eradicated in 2015 and type 3 in 2019, leaving type 1 as the only wild poliovirus.
Q 10Which world-famous violinist has performed seated since polio struck him at the age of four?
Itzhak Perlman
Itzhak Perlman took up the violin after hearing it on the radio, and by thirteen he had left Israel to study at the Juilliard School.
Q 11Which part of the body does paralytic polio most often affect?
The legs
The legs: the virus destroys the spinal cord's motor nerve cells unevenly, so the weakness is usually lopsided, with one leg hit harder than the other.
Q 12Post-polio syndrome, striking decades after infection, put which Sri Lanka-based science-fiction author in a wheelchair?
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke lived with the syndrome for years; when he turned 90 he recorded a farewell message to his friends and fans, a few months before he died in 2008.
Q 13What is the popular name for the negative-pressure ventilator used to keep polio patients breathing?
Iron lung
Q 21Once the vaccines had tamed polio, the March of Dimes turned its fundraising to preventing what?
Birth defects
Birth defects became its new cause once polio was beaten, and the charity went on to champion folic acid and newborn screening for healthier pregnancies.
Q 22Which software tycoon's foundation joined the global polio eradication drive in 2007 and became one of its biggest funders?
Bill Gates
Bill Gates's foundation calls ending polio a top priority, and beyond paying for campaigns it has funded the development of safer vaccines for stopping outbreaks.
Q 23The first March of Dimes appeal asked Americans to send dimes to the White House ahead of what date?
Roosevelt's birthday
Iron lung: it grew out of research on reviving victims of gas poisoning, paid for by a gas company, before the polio epidemics made it a household name.
Q 14Philip Drinker and Louis Shaw built the first widely used mechanical respirator, a lifeline for polio patients, at which university?
Harvard
Harvard's team first tried it on an eight-year-old girl at the nearby Children's Hospital, who revived within minutes of the pump being switched on.
Q 15Which Canadian singer-songwriter, paralysed by polio at nine, said her spine was 'twisted up like a train wreck'?
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell spent weeks in hospital as a child, and she said the illness came back 'with a vengeance' forty years later, wasting her muscles.
Q 16In July 2022 health officials announced that polio had paralysed an unvaccinated young adult in which US state?
New York
New York traced the case to Rockland County, then found the virus in the wastewater of several counties, a sign that it had been spreading unseen.
Q 17Polio outbreaks made parents across the US dread which season?
Summer
Summer brought an epidemic somewhere in the country year after year, so parents kept children out of swimming pools and movie theaters and warned them off public drinking fountains.
Q 18Before any child received Salk's experimental vaccine, which animals proved it could prevent paralysis?
Monkeys
Monkeys stood in for children because few other animals catch polio at all; once the killed vaccine protected them, Salk moved on to human trials.
Q 19Roosevelt fell ill in August 1921 at his family's holiday home on which island?
Campobello
Campobello, in Canada's New Brunswick, was the family's holiday retreat; he fell overboard into the icy Bay of Fundy, and the next day the back pain and weakness began.
Q 20Which Georgia resort did Roosevelt buy in 1926 and turn into a polio rehabilitation centre?
Warm Springs
Warm Springs drew him from 1924 for its naturally warm mineral pools; when the resort ran into money trouble two years later, he bought it rather than let it close.
Roosevelt's birthday already meant charity balls for polio; radio star Eddie Cantor added a plea for 'a march of dimes to reach all the way to the White House', and millions arrived.
Q 24Jonas Salk developed his polio vaccine in a laboratory at which university?
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh's lab produced a vaccine Salk trusted enough to inject into himself and his own family in 1953, a year before the national trial.
Q 25Asked on television who owned the patent on his vaccine, Salk replied "Could you patent the ..." what?
Sun
Sun: his full answer began 'Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent.' He never earned a cent from the vaccine, preferring it be distributed as widely as possible.
Q 26Which broadcaster told Salk "Young man, a great tragedy has befallen you — you've lost your anonymity"?
Edward R. Murrow
Edward R. Murrow said it on the night the vaccine was declared a success; Salk later agreed, calling celebrity contrary to what a scientist is supposed to be.
Q 27Which chemical, also used to preserve specimens, kills the virus in Salk's polio vaccine?
Formaldehyde
Formaldehyde leaves the virus unable to cause disease but still able to prompt antibodies, a method Salk had already used on a flu vaccine in the 1940s.
Q 28Which Depression-era photographer walked with a lifelong limp after catching polio at seven?
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange went on regardless to open her own portrait studio at 23 and, in 1936, to take Migrant Mother, the best-known photograph of the Depression.
Q 29What nickname was given to the schoolchildren who took part in the 1954 trial of Salk's vaccine?
Polio Pioneers
Polio Pioneers were aged six to nine; in some areas half got the vaccine and half a placebo, in a trial run by Thomas Francis, Salk's old mentor from flu research.
Q 30The 1955 vaccine 'incident' that halted polio vaccinations across the US is named after which company?
Cutter
Cutter Laboratories of California shipped batches in which the virus had survived, and children were paralysed; vaccinations resumed only once tighter safety standards were in place.