Tuberculosis Trivia
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48 free Tuberculosis trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This tuberculosis trivia quiz covers the disease that killed a quarter of Europe in the nineteenth century and still kills more people than any other single infection today. The easy questions cover the bacterium, the way it spreads, the organ it usually attacks, the old name consumption and the man who found the cause. From there the quiz moves through the history: Hippocrates and phthisis, Egyptian mummies with tubercular spines, kings touching the scrofulous, the vampire panics of New England, the first sanatorium in Silesia and the anti-spitting campaigns. The hard end covers the science and the modern fight: how slowly the bacillus divides, the granuloma that gives the disease its name, the tuberculin Koch wrongly sold as a cure, Calmette and Guerin's vaccine, the Rutgers student who isolated streptomycin, the four first-line drugs, MDR and XDR strains, the Xpert test, World TB Day, the countries carrying most of the burden and the WHO's End TB targets. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for tuberculosis, streptomycin, scrofula, sanatoria and Christmas seals before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our human body, medicine and pandemics quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The bacterium that causes TB belongs to which genus?
Mycobacterium
Mycobacterium. The genus wears a thick, waxy coat that shrugs off the standard lab stain and helps it survive drying out, weak disinfectants and the body's own defences.
Q 02By what name was tuberculosis most commonly known in nineteenth-century English?
Consumption
Consumption. The word had meant a wasting illness since the 1300s, and it fitted the way patients grew thinner and weaker, as if the disease were using them up.
Q 03How does tuberculosis usually spread?
Through the air when an infected person coughs
It travels through the air when an infected person coughs, sneezes, talks or sings. Catching it usually takes long hours of shared indoor air, so most people get it from family or workmates.
Q 04Which literary family lost at least five of its six children to tuberculosis?
The Brontës
The Brontës. Maria and Elizabeth died as schoolgirls in 1825, and Branwell, Emily and Anne followed within nine months of one another in 1848-49, leaving Charlotte the last of the six.
Q 05Who identified the bacillus that causes tuberculosis in 1882?
Robert Koch
Robert Koch. The germ is so hard to stain and so slow to grow that he had to devise new methods for both before he could show it to fellow doctors under the microscope.
Q 06World Tuberculosis Day marks the 1882 announcement of the TB germ's discovery in which city?
Berlin
Berlin, on 24 March. The discoverer laid his microscope slides and other evidence before a room of fellow scientists; the campaign day itself was first proposed for the centenary in 1982.
Q 07Roughly what fraction of the world's population is estimated to have latent tuberculosis?
One-quarter
One-quarter, roughly two billion people. Most will never fall ill: the bacteria stay walled off and dormant in about nine carriers out of ten.
Q 08How do people with latent TB infection differ from those with active tuberculosis?
They cannot spread it
They cannot spread it, and they feel perfectly well. A course of preventive medicine can clear the dormant bacteria before they ever wake up.
Q 09Which vaccine, first used in 1921, was still the only licensed TB vaccine as of 2025?
BCG
BCG, short for Bacille Calmette-Guérin. It shields babies from the deadliest childhood forms of TB but gives adults only patchy protection, and as of 2025 nothing better had been licensed.
Q 10Which ancient disease is caused by a close cousin of the TB bacterium, from the very same genus?
Leprosy
Leprosy. The two germs are such close relatives that the century-old vaccine against TB also gives partial protection against leprosy.
Q 11Penicillin did nothing against TB, so which 1940s antibiotic became the first that could cure it?
Streptomycin
Streptomycin. In Britain's first trial patients rallied, then many worsened as the germ grew resistant to the lone drug, which is why TB has been treated with several drugs at once ever since.
Q 12Which PhD student isolated the first anti-TB antibiotic in Selman Waksman's lab in 1943?
Albert Schatz
Albert Schatz. He sued his supervisor to be recognised as co-discoverer and won a share of the royalties, yet the 1952 Nobel Prize went to the supervisor alone.
Q 13The first antibiotic to cure TB came from a microbe found in what?
Soil
Q 21The forearm injection used to check for TB infection is named after which physician?
Mantoux
Mantoux. Charles Mantoux devised it in the 1900s: a drop goes into the skin and the bump is measured two or three days later, though a past TB vaccination can set off a false alarm.
Q 22Which ancient Greek physician described phthisis, generally equated with tuberculosis, around 400 BCE?
Hippocrates
Hippocrates. He noted that it struck mainly between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, and he believed it ran in families instead of passing from person to person.
Q 23Roughly how old are the oldest Egyptian mummies that show the spinal damage of tuberculosis?
About 5,000 years
Soil. The lab behind it had been systematically testing soil microbes for any that held back the TB germ; one winning strain came from a heavily manured field, another from a chicken's throat.
Q 14How long is the usual course of first-line drug treatment for tuberculosis?
Six months
Six months. Patients often feel well within weeks, but stopping the pills early can let the surviving bacteria bounce back, this time resistant to the drugs.
Q 15Before antibiotics, doctors often treated a tuberculous lung by deliberately doing what to it?
Collapsing it
Collapsing it. Letting air into the chest made the diseased lung go slack so that it could 'rest' and heal, the mainstay of treatment for the first half of the 20th century.
Q 16Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis is defined as resistance to which two drugs?
Rifampicin and isoniazid
Rifampicin and isoniazid, the two most effective first-line drugs. Strains that shrug off both need longer, costlier, harsher treatment, and only about two in five patients got it in 2024.
Q 17How often does the TB bacterium divide, a pace that makes it unusually slow-growing?
About once a day
About once a day, where a gut bacterium such as E. coli can divide every 20 minutes. That is why growing TB from a patient's sample can take weeks to give an answer.
Q 18Tuberculosis is named after the tubercle, which is what?
A small, hard nodule
A small, hard nodule. Immune cells pile up around the bacteria to wall them in, which stops the infection spreading, though the germs can survive inside the wall.
Q 19Which type of immune cell does the TB bacterium survive and multiply inside after being engulfed?
Macrophage
Macrophage. These cells normally digest whatever they swallow, but the TB bacterium blocks that step, breeds inside and eventually destroys its would-be killer.
Q 20Tuberculin, launched in 1890 as a TB 'remedy', failed as a cure but was later adapted into what?
A skin test for infection
A skin test for infection. Hailed as a cure, the extract proved ineffective and opinion swung against it, but a tiny dose under the skin turned out to reveal who was carrying the germ.
About 5,000 years. The telltale sign is a spine collapsed into a sharp hump, damage so distinctive that it can be recognised in bones thousands of years after death.
Q 24Tuberculosis was long nicknamed a 'plague' and a 'death' of which colour?
White
White. The great white plague and the white death took their name from the extreme pallor of the sick, a wan look that fashionable society even came to admire.
Q 25What was scrofula historically called because monarchs were thought able to cure it by touch?
The king's evil
The king's evil. English and French monarchs touched sufferers for centuries, and English kings came to hang a gold coin called an angel round each patient's neck as a charm.
Q 26Deaths from tuberculosis in 19th-century New England were associated in folklore with what?
Vampires
Vampires. Families believed the first to die was draining the life from those who sickened next, so bodies were dug up and their hearts burned, as with Mercy Brown in Rhode Island in 1892.
Q 27Who founded the sanatorium in Silesia in the 1850s that launched the open-air cure for tuberculosis?
Hermann Brehmer
Hermann Brehmer. By one account he had cured his own TB in the Himalayas as a student; his clinic put patients on fresh air, walks and plentiful food, and was copied across Europe.
Q 28Edward Trudeau's Cottage Sanitarium, which made the fresh-air TB cure famous in America, stood in which Adirondack village?
Saranac Lake
Saranac Lake. Trudeau, a doctor with TB himself, housed his first two patients in a one-room cottage called Little Red; Robert Louis Stevenson later came for the cure.
Q 29Which Thomas Mann novel is set in a tuberculosis sanatorium?
The Magic Mountain
The Magic Mountain. Its hero arrives at an Alpine clinic for a three-week visit and stays seven years; Mann himself needed over a decade to finish it, interrupted by the First World War.
Q 30Which Romantic poet, who had trained as a surgeon, died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821?
John Keats
John Keats. When he first coughed up blood in 1820 he recognised it at once as arterial, called it his death warrant, and sailed for Italy's warmer air that autumn.