100 Fun Facts About Diseases

Abraham Lincoln was coming down with smallpox when he gave which speech in November 1863?

The Gettysburg Address was followed by fever and a rash; his doctors called it mild 'varioloid', but a 2007 review argues he had full smallpox and they played it down.

Which Cambridge graduate, sent home by the plague of 1665, began his greatest discoveries at his Lincolnshire family home?

Isaac Newton later said a falling apple first gave him the notion of gravitation in those years, yet he published the theory only two decades later.

The viral 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge raised some $220 million worldwide for research into which disease?

ALS charities gained hugely, yet the challenge also drew criticism as a publicity stunt that wasted water.

Anne Frank is believed to have died at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945 of which louse-borne disease?

Typhus killed Anne and her sister Margot in February or March 1945, only weeks before British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April.

Twenty dog-sled teams relayed diphtheria antitoxin almost 700 miles across Alaska in 1925 to save which town?

Nome got its serum after Togo's team ran the longest and most dangerous stretches, yet the fame went to Balto, who led the final leg.

Which nickname for Britons began as a jibe at Royal Navy sailors dosed against scurvy?

Limey is short for 'lime-juicer', yet switching the navy from lemons to colony-grown limes backfired: limes hold far less vitamin C.

Which star, diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1991, kept it secret until 1998?

Michael J. Fox went public while starring in Spin City, left the show after one more season, and launched his Parkinson's research foundation in 2000.

Which former US president's centre has led the drive to wipe out Guinea worm disease since 1986?

Jimmy Carter's centre helped cut Guinea worm from an estimated 3.5 million cases a year in 1986 to just 14 in 2023. It would be only the second human disease ever eradicated.

The CDC was founded in 1946 in which US city, chosen because its first mission was fighting malaria in the South?

Atlanta already housed the wartime malaria-control office, so most of the new agency's scientists were entomologists and engineers rather than doctors.

Which US president announced his Alzheimer's diagnosis in a handwritten letter to the nation in 1994?

Ronald Reagan went public hoping to raise awareness, noting that his and Nancy's open disclosures of their cancers had led many more people to get tested.

Which boxer, his arm trembling from Parkinson's, lit the cauldron at the 1996 Summer Olympics?

Muhammad Ali also received a replacement for his 1960 gold, long said to lie in the Ohio River, though he had told NBC's Dick Ebersol he simply lost it.

Which royal made headlines in 1987 by shaking hands with an AIDS patient to fight the stigma?

Princess Diana did it while opening the UK's first specialist AIDS ward, at London's Middlesex Hospital, and was credited with dispelling the myth that the virus spread by touch.

Which NBA star stunned sport in November 1991 by announcing he had contracted HIV?

Magic Johnson retired on the spot and won gold with the 1992 Dream Team, but dropped a planned NBA comeback when other players voiced fears about playing beside him.

Which oil, long spooned into reluctant children, was confirmed in the 1920s to prevent rickets?

Cod liver oil works because it is rich in vitamin D, which rickets sufferers lack; folk medicine had long favoured the oil before scientists found out why.

Which US president, his legs paralysed by illness in 1921, founded the charity that became the March of Dimes?

Franklin Roosevelt's foundation funded the research behind Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, then, with polio beaten in the US, turned its fight to birth defects and premature babies.

Which American folk singer died in 1967 of Huntington's disease, inherited from his mother?

Woody Guthrie's doctors first blamed alcoholism or schizophrenia; only later was it found to be the disease that had put his mother in an institution.

Which priest, canonised in 2009, served Hawaii's Molokai leprosy colony from 1873 until his death in 1889?

Father Damien, a Belgian missionary, lived among the patients without separating himself, caught leprosy after years there, and kept working until it killed him.

A butterfly-shaped rash across the cheeks and nose is a classic sign of which autoimmune disease?

Lupus is Latin for wolf, perhaps because early doctors thought its skin sores looked like a wolf's bite or like flesh being devoured.

Which virus, named after the Ugandan forest where it was found in 1947, was linked to a 2016 wave of birth defects?

Zika usually causes only mild symptoms, yet infection in pregnancy can cause microcephaly, and the WHO declared a global health emergency over it in February 2016.

Which nurse drew 'rose' diagrams showing that disease killed far more soldiers than battle wounds did?

Florence Nightingale blamed overcrowding and poor sanitation, and used her data to push the army and government to reform barracks and hospitals.

The first immortal human cell line, grown from a cervical cancer patient's tumour in 1951, is known by what name?

HeLa cells came from Henrietta Lacks, whose tissue was taken without her consent; in 2021 her descendants sued a biotech company for profiting from them.

The haemophilia of Alexei, son of Tsar Nicholas II, gave which self-styled holy man his hold at court?

Rasputin seemed to ease Alexei's bleeding when doctors could not, but in 1916 a group of noblemen who feared his influence over the imperial family murdered him.

Which British queen spread the haemophilia dubbed the 'royal disease' into dynasties across Europe?

Victoria passed on a disease whose type stayed unknown for generations, until scientists tested DNA from the remains of the Romanovs in 2009 and found it was the rarer haemophilia B.

Which Romantic poet, once a surgeon-apothecary's apprentice, died young of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821?

John Keats had been savaged by the Quarterly Review, and Shelley blamed his decline on the attacks, yet tuberculosis had already killed his mother.

Max Theiler won the 1951 Nobel Prize in Medicine for a 1937 vaccine against which mosquito-borne disease?

Yellow fever infected Theiler himself during his lab work, yet the mild bout only made him immune; the disease had killed many other researchers.

Which British doctor found the malaria parasite inside a mosquito in India in 1897, earning the 1902 Nobel Prize?

Ronald Ross dissected mosquitoes in Secunderabad until, on 20 August 1897, he found the parasite in one insect's gut, proving that mosquitoes carried the disease. That date is now World Mosquito Day.

Which doctor argued in 1881 that a mosquito spread the disease Walter Reed's team confirmed in 1900?

Carlos Finlay held to the idea through years of ridicule, and the Reed commission tested it with mosquitoes bred from Finlay's own laboratory stock.

British officials in colonial India mixed which bitter anti-malaria drug with soda and sugar, creating tonic water?

Quinine from cinchona bark was so bitter that the British also mixed their tonic with gin, giving the world the gin and tonic.

Spain's 1803 Balmis Expedition kept the smallpox vaccine alive across the Atlantic by carrying it in whom?

Orphan boys kept the vaccine alive by passing it from arm to arm, and the director of their orphanage sailed with them to look after them.

Apart from a CDC lab in the United States, the only site allowed to keep live smallpox virus is in which country?

Russia's Vector Institute holds one of the two official stocks; after a 1978 laboratory accident in Birmingham killed a woman, every other known sample was destroyed or handed over.

Which US city rushed to vaccinate millions against smallpox in spring 1947 after a traveller from Mexico died of the disease?

New York's mayor urged every resident to be vaccinated, and the outbreak was over within weeks with only two deaths.

Maurice Hilleman made his mumps vaccine from a virus he took from whom when they fell ill in 1963?

His daughter Jeryl Lynn gave her name to the vaccine strain, which Hilleman later built into the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

Which medical journal retracted Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism?

The Lancet withdrew the paper in February 2010 after a Sunday Times investigation by Brian Deer, and Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register three months later.

Fleming found penicillin in 1928, but Howard Florey's team made it a usable drug a decade later at which university?

Oxford's team gave penicillin to a policeman with a severe infection in 1941; he rallied, then relapsed and died when the scant supply ran out.

Which US president was diagnosed with the adrenal disorder Addison's disease in a London hospital in 1947?

John F. Kennedy kept the illness from voters, and the full extent of his medical problems emerged only long after his death.

Christiaan Eijkman's Nobel-winning clue to beriberi came when his lab chickens fell ill on a diet of what?

Polished rice was the culprit: Eijkman had been hunting a germ, until the birds' feed switched to unpolished rice and they quickly recovered.

Which drug, isolated in Selman Waksman's lab in 1943, became the first antibiotic cure for tuberculosis?

Streptomycin was actually isolated by Waksman's graduate student Albert Schatz from a soil bacterium, yet only Waksman received the 1952 Nobel Prize for it.

James Parkinson first described the disease later named after him in an 1817 work, 'An Essay on the' what?

Shaking Palsy was Parkinson's own term, but Jean-Martin Charcot pushed for 'Parkinson's disease', noting that patients were slow rather than truly weak.

Which Tudor queen survived smallpox in 1562, an illness that scarred her and cost her much of her hair?

Elizabeth I's near-fatal illness alarmed Parliament, which in 1563 pressed her to marry or name an heir; she refused to do either.

Which Italian anatomist isolated the cholera bacterium in 1854, thirty years before a German got the credit?

Filippo Pacini found the comma-shaped bacillus during autopsies of cholera victims and called it a Vibrio, but his work was ignored in an age that blamed bad air.

Rinderpest, the cattle plague eradicated in 2011, had its last confirmed case in 2001 in which African country?

Kenya's 2001 case was the last of a cattle plague whose 1890s sweep through Africa killed herds on a vast scale and brought widespread famine.

Which WHO doctor identified SARS as a new disease in Hanoi in 2003, then died of it within weeks?

Carlo Urbani's early warning triggered a global response credited with saving many lives; he fell ill on a flight to Bangkok in March 2003 and died on 29 March.

The Sin Nombre hantavirus behind the 1993 Four Corners outbreak spreads to people from which animal?

Deer mouse droppings spread the virus, which was left 'without a name' after the Navajo Nation objected to Muerto Canyon virus, a label tying the disease to its reservation.

Timothy Ray Brown, cured of HIV by a stem-cell transplant for leukaemia, was known by what nickname?

The Berlin Patient label preserved his anonymity when the cure was announced at a 2008 conference; his donor carried two copies of a rare CCR5 mutation that blocks HIV from entering cells.

Which Toronto teenager became, in January 1922, the first patient given Banting and Best's pancreatic extract?

Leonard Thompson reacted badly to the impure first dose, but a purer extract given twelve days later worked, and he lived another 13 years.

Kuru, the prion disease spread by funeral rites among the Fore people, was studied from the 1950s in which country?

Papua New Guinea's Fore ate dead relatives at funeral feasts, and women and children, who ate the most infectious tissue, were hit hardest; kuru means trembling.

The high-yield strain behind mass-produced penicillin was found in Peoria, Illinois, in 1943, growing on what?

A mouldy cantaloupe gave the highest-yielding strain turned up by a worldwide search, and it was adopted for industrial penicillin production.

Which US president launched the 'war on cancer' by signing the National Cancer Act on 23 December 1971?

Richard Nixon's act strengthened the National Cancer Institute, and its budget then rose sharply, with much of the money going into basic cancer research.

Whose landmark 1964 report on smoking and health concluded that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer?

The Surgeon General's office had already linked smoking to lung cancer in 1957 and 1959, and Britain's Royal College of Physicians had blamed it in 1962.

Before COVID-19, which outbreak had the WHO most recently declared a pandemic, back in June 2009?

Swine flu got its name because the new virus probably passed from pigs to people, yet pigs played no part in its spread around the world.

Hippocrates named cancer after which animal, whose legs the swollen veins around a tumour were said to resemble?

The crab gave cancer its name: Hippocrates called tumours 'karkinos', the Greek word for the animal. The Roman writer Celsus later translated it into Latin as 'cancer'.

The first chemotherapy drugs, tried on a lymphoma patient in 1942, grew out of which First World War weapon?

Mustard gas left its victims with wrecked bone marrow and lymph tissue, so two Yale pharmacologists tried a close chemical relative, nitrogen mustard, against a cancer of those tissues.

Hat makers once suffered confusion and mood swings, nicknamed 'mad hatter disease', from breathing which metal's vapour?

Mercury was used in making felt, and its fumes slowly poisoned the workers' nervous systems. The trade is often credited with the phrase 'mad as a hatter', though the saying's origin is disputed.

Albert Sabin's oral polio vaccine of the 1960s was often given to children as drops on what?

A sugar cube made the vaccine easy to give without a needle, which suited mass campaigns. Sabin tested the weakened virus first on himself and his own family.

Which largely preventable condition does the World Health Organization call the most common health problem on Earth?

Tooth decay in adult teeth tops the Global Burden of Disease list. It starts when mouth bacteria turn sugars from food and drink into acids that destroy the tooth over time.

Which element, added to table salt sold in Michigan from 1924, prevents the neck swelling called goitre?

Iodine is what the thyroid needs to work, and goitres were once especially common around the Great Lakes. Within months of the Michigan launch, Morton was selling iodised salt nationwide.

Which painful joint condition, nicknamed the 'disease of kings', most often strikes the base of the big toe?

Gout earned the nickname from its link to rich food and drink. An attack begins when uric acid in the blood forms crystals that settle in a joint.

Bob Marley died in 1981 of which cancer, first found under the nail of his right big toe?

Melanoma of this rare kind grows on the soles or under the nails rather than on sun-exposed skin. Marley refused to have the toe amputated, and the cancer spread to his lungs and brain.

Which everyday illness is caused by more than 200 different viruses, which is why no vaccine exists?

The common cold is mostly the work of rhinoviruses, which alone come in more than 100 types. The average adult catches two or three colds a year, and a child six to eight.

Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever are both passed to people by the bite of which creatures?

Ticks are blood-feeding arachnids, relatives of spiders rather than insects. Lyme disease is the most common illness they spread in the Northern Hemisphere.

Type 1 diabetes develops when the immune system destroys the pancreas cells that make which hormone?

Insulin has to be injected or pumped in every day once those cells are gone. Because it so often begins in childhood, type 1 used to be called juvenile diabetes.

People with coeliac disease suffer damage to the small intestine when they eat which protein, found in wheat and barley?

Gluten sets off an immune attack on the lining of the gut in roughly one person in a hundred. The only treatment is a strict lifelong diet without it.

Which condition, first described by an English physician in the 1860s, is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21?

Down syndrome takes its name from that physician, John Langdon Down. It is also called trisomy 21, because most people with it carry three copies of the chromosome in every cell.

The FAST test, which checks the face, arms and speech, helps bystanders spot which medical emergency?

A stroke demands speed, so the T in FAST stands for time to call the emergency services. British doctors and ambulance crews devised the test in 1998.

Most skin cancers are caused by overexposure to which type of radiation, given off by the sun and by tanning beds?

Ultraviolet rays damage the DNA in skin cells, and sunlight alone accounts for more than 90% of cases.

Tom Hanks won his first Oscar for playing a lawyer fired because he had AIDS in which 1993 film?

Philadelphia was the first big-budget, big-star Hollywood film to tackle AIDS. Hanks won Best Actor again a year later for Forrest Gump.

Which disease, almost always fatal once symptoms appear, do about 99% of human victims worldwide catch from dogs?

Rabies can be stopped even after a bite if treatment starts within about ten days. Louis Pasteur and Émile Roux developed the first vaccine against it in 1885.

Mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining around the lungs, is caused in most cases by breathing in fibres of which mineral?

Asbestos does its damage slowly: the cancer generally appears about 40 years after exposure. More than 80% of cases are traced to the mineral, often among people who worked with it.

Michael Jackson said in 1993 that his lightening skin was caused by which condition, later confirmed by his autopsy?

Vitiligo makes patches of skin lose their pigment, and Jackson had been diagnosed with it in 1986. He said he had never bleached his skin on purpose and used make-up to even out the blotches.

In which 1990 film does Robin Williams play a doctor treating survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic?

Awakenings is based on the neurologist Oliver Sacks's 1973 memoir of the same name. Robert De Niro earned an Oscar nomination as a patient who comes round after decades.

A shortage of which mineral is the most common cause of anaemia worldwide?

Iron is what the body uses to build haemoglobin, so too little of it means too few healthy red blood cells. One odd warning sign is a craving to chew ice.

A lack of which nutrient, first felt as poor night vision, is the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness?

Vitamin A is needed by the eye to turn light into nerve signals, which is why night blindness comes first. Severe shortage goes on to damage the cornea itself.

Which inherited condition clogs the lungs with thick mucus and makes a child's sweat taste unusually salty?

Cystic fibrosis is sometimes first noticed when a parent tastes salt while kissing their child, and a sweat test confirms it. About one in 25 people of Northern European descent carries the gene.

Which brain condition did the ancient Greeks call the 'sacred disease', blaming its sudden attacks on spirits?

Epilepsy was given a natural cause by Hippocrates, who argued in the fifth century BC that it began in the brain and could be treated like any other illness.

Which 'silent killer', as the World Health Organization calls it, is diagnosed from readings of 140 over 90 or above?

High blood pressure rarely causes symptoms, so nearly half the people who have it do not know. Left untreated for years, it quietly damages the heart and arteries.

Lassa fever, a viral illness spread by rats in West Africa, takes its name from a town in which country?

Nigeria's town of Lassa, in Borno State, is where the virus was first described in 1969. People usually catch it through contact with the droppings of a common African rat.

Which actress announced in 2013 her choice of a double mastectomy after tests found a faulty BRCA1 gene?

Angelina Jolie had lost her mother to ovarian cancer and was told her own risk of breast cancer was 87%. Her essay set off wide public discussion of genetic testing.

Children with flu or chickenpox are warned off which everyday painkiller because of its link to Reye's syndrome?

Aspirin is tied to about 90% of childhood cases of the rare, sometimes fatal disorder. Rates fell by more than 90% after the US and UK stopped giving it to children in the 1980s.

Which cigar-loving US president raced to finish his memoirs in 1885 while dying of throat cancer?

Ulysses S. Grant was nearly penniless and wrote to leave his wife an income; his friend Mark Twain published the book on far better terms than a rival had offered. He finished it only days before he died.

Willem Kolff's 1943 machine, built from sausage casings and orange juice cans, did the job of which failing body part?

The kidneys clean the blood, and Kolff's dialysis machine did that job from outside the body. He built it in the wartime Netherlands and saved his first patient with it in 1945.

Parkinson's disease results from the gradual loss of brain cells that produce which chemical messenger?

Dopamine-producing neurons die off in a small brain region called the substantia nigra, which upsets the control of movement. The main drug, levodopa, is a precursor the body turns into the missing chemical.

Multiple sclerosis develops when the immune system attacks which fatty coating that insulates nerve fibres?

Myelin helps nerves carry their signals, and scars form wherever it is stripped away. Those many scars, or scleroses, are what give the disease its name.

Which disease, epidemic in the American South in the early 1900s, did Joseph Goldberger trace to a poor diet?

Pellagra comes from too little niacin, and its classic signs are the 'four Ds': diarrhoea, dermatitis, dementia and death. It killed more than 100,000 Americans before food was fortified.

Which mosquito-borne infection, known for severe muscle and joint pain, is nicknamed 'breakbone fever'?

Dengue puts about half the world's population at risk, with an estimated 100 to 400 million infections a year. Most people who catch it have mild symptoms or none at all.

Which childhood illness, marked by a red rash and a 'strawberry tongue', weakens Beth March in Little Women?

Scarlet fever is caused by the same streptococcus bacteria as strep throat, though only a small number of those infected develop it. Beth catches it while caring for a poor family's sick baby.

Which infection, mild in children but dangerous to unborn babies, is the 'R' in the MMR vaccine?

Rubella caught in early pregnancy can cause miscarriage or serious birth defects. Its other name is German measles, after the German physicians who first described it.

Which old name for tuberculosis, common in the 1800s, described the way the illness seemed to waste the body away?

Consumption was blamed for an estimated quarter of all deaths in Europe in the 1800s. The disease was also known as phthisis and the White Plague.

For centuries, English and French monarchs claimed to cure scrofula, the 'king's evil', by doing what to sufferers?

Touching them seemed to work because scrofula, a tuberculosis of the neck glands, rarely killed and often went into remission on its own.

Lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic infection spread by mosquitoes, can cause which disfiguring swelling of the limbs?

Elephantiasis develops in only some of those infected, after parasites nest in the lymph vessels and disrupt them. It was the first disease to be linked directly to mosquitoes.

Which 1975 Wimbledon champion is believed to have caught HIV from a blood transfusion during heart surgery in 1983?

Arthur Ashe went public in April 1992 and spent his last months educating people about AIDS through a foundation he set up. He had beaten the heavy favourite, Jimmy Connors, in that Wimbledon final.

What term describes an infectious disease, such as bird flu or anthrax, that jumps from other animals to humans?

Zoonosis is where most new threats begin: about 60% of known human infectious diseases, and up to 75% of emerging ones, started in animals.

What term describes a disease that is constantly present in a particular place, as chickenpox is in the United Kingdom?

Endemic comes from Greek words meaning 'in the people'. An endemic disease has steady, predictable numbers, and it becomes an epidemic only when cases surge beyond them.

In the study of disease, what name is given to a creature such as a mosquito that carries a pathogen between hosts?

A vector is usually a blood-feeding arthropod, which picks up a pathogen during one meal and can pass it on at the next. Mosquitoes are the most familiar example.

What term describes the indirect protection unvaccinated people gain once enough of a community has been vaccinated?

Herd immunity takes a very high share of people for the most contagious diseases: for measles, more than 95% must be immune before outbreaks stop.

What term describes cancer spreading from where it began to distant parts of the body, the cause of most cancer deaths?

Metastasis happens when tumour cells travel through the blood or the lymph system to seed new growths. Those secondary growths, rather than the first tumour, cause most cancer deaths.

The build-up of fatty plaque inside the arteries, which can begin in childhood, is known by what medical name?

Atherosclerosis usually causes no symptoms for decades, because the artery widens to make room for the plaque. Trouble starts when a plaque ruptures and a clot narrows or closes the vessel.

Pregnant women are told to avoid cleaning cat litter trays because of which parasitic infection?

Toxoplasmosis parasites can reproduce sexually only in the cat family, and they leave in the droppings. Up to half of the world's people carry the parasite without any symptoms.

In 1775 surgeon Percivall Pott made the first link between a job and cancer when he studied which soot-covered workers?

Chimney sweeps developed a cancer of the scrotum from years of contact with soot, Pott showed.

Which form of severe malnutrition, marked by a swollen belly, strikes children who get too little protein?

Kwashiorkor is a word from the Ga language of Ghana, meaning roughly 'the sickness the baby gets when the new baby comes', since it strikes children weaned when a sibling arrives.

St Anthony's fire, which brought gangrene and convulsions to medieval Europe, came from a fungus on which grain?

Rye contaminated with the ergot fungus poisoned those who ate it. The name honours the monks of the Order of St Anthony, who devoted themselves to treating the victims.