Cholera Trivia
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49 free Cholera trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This cholera trivia quiz covers the disease that killed tens of millions in the 19th century and still kills tens of thousands a year. The easy questions ask what kind of organism causes it, how it spreads, why it was called the 'blue death', which London doctor traced an outbreak to a water pump and what simple treatment saves most patients today. From there it moves through the seven pandemics, the scientists who isolated the bacterium, the vaccine pioneers and the modern outbreaks in Haiti, Yemen and Zimbabwe. The hard end is for people who have read The Ghost Map: the brewery workers who escaped the Soho outbreak, the nappy that started it, the two water companies Snow compared, the Italian whose 1854 discovery was ignored for a century, the Bengali doctor who published oral rehydration in The Lancet in 1953, the Russian riots against 'poisoning' doctors, the president and the physicist who died of it, and the composer whose death may or may not have been cholera at all. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on cholera, John Snow, the 1854 Broad Street outbreak, Vibrio cholerae, Filippo Pacini, Robert Koch, oral rehydration therapy, cholera vaccines, the Haiti and Yemen outbreaks and Love in the Time of Cholera before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our medicine, pandemics and Victorian London quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cholera is an infection of the small intestine caused by what kind of organism?
A bacterium
A bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, is the culprit: it never invades the gut wall but sits on its lining and releases a toxin that makes the intestine pour out water.
Q 02Most swallowed cholera germs never cause illness because they are destroyed by what?
Stomach acid
Stomach acid kills most of them, so it takes a huge dose to make a healthy adult ill; people taking acid-suppressing drugs can be infected by far fewer.
Q 03Cholera was nicknamed the 'blue death' because of what effect on patients?
Their skin turned bluish-grey from fluid loss
Their skin turned bluish-grey from fluid loss as the circulation failed; untreated, cholera can drain the body so fast that it kills within hours.
Q 04The death from cholera of General Lamarque in 1832 sparked the Paris uprising at the heart of which novel?
Les Misérables
Les Misérables builds to the barricades of June 1832, which went up at the funeral of Lamarque, a popular general; the same epidemic had killed France's prime minister two weeks earlier.
Q 05Which now-famous graphic did John Snow make of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak?
A dot map of deaths
A dot map of deaths, each one marked as a small black bar at the victim's address, showed them piling up around a single water pump; it is now a classic of disease mapping.
Q 06The doctor investigating the 1854 Soho outbreak persuaded the local council to do what to the Broad Street water pump?
Removing its handle
Removing its handle shut the pump the day after he put his evidence to the parish board, yet for years most doctors went on rejecting his explanation of the disease.
Q 07Which engineer built London's sewers after its cholera epidemics?
Joseph Bazalgette
Joseph Bazalgette's sewers were built on a mistaken theory of how cholera spread, yet by carrying waste away from the water supply they ended the city's outbreaks.
Q 08Why did no workers at the Broad Street brewery die of cholera in 1854?
They drank beer, not pump water
They drank beer, not pump water: the men had a daily allowance of malt liquor and the brewery had its own deep well, so its owner was sure they never used the street pump.
Q 09The Broad Street well was contaminated by an old cesspit into which water from washing what had drained?
A sick baby's nappies
A sick baby's nappies were washed at 40 Broad Street and the water tipped into a cesspit that leaked into the well a few feet away; the child is counted as the outbreak's first case.
Q 10Who was Henry Whitehead, who traced the Broad Street outbreak to its first case?
A local curate
A local curate at St Luke's, Whitehead knew the families of his parish, and that knowledge let him trace the outbreak to the house where its first victim lived, right beside the pump.
Q 11Customers of London's Lambeth water company suffered far less cholera in 1854 because it had moved its intake where?
Upriver, above the tide
Upriver, above the tide at Thames Ditton, Lambeth drew water beyond the reach of the capital's sewage; a rival still pumping from the tidal Thames lost far more of its customers.
Q 12Apart from cholera, the Broad Street investigator is famous for giving which monarch chloroform during childbirth?
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria asked for it at Prince Leopold's birth in 1853 and again for Princess Beatrice four years later; he gave just enough to dull the pain without putting her under.
Q 13The miasma theory, which most doctors of the 1850s accepted, blamed cholera on what?
Q 21Cholera first reached Canada in 1832 with immigrant ships from Britain, entering through which port city?
Quebec
Quebec was the gateway: a quarantine station opened just downriver on Grosse Isle in 1832 to inspect every immigrant ship, yet cholera got through and epidemics kept returning into the 1850s.
Q 22An 1892 outbreak in which German port city killed more than 8,600 people?
Hamburg
Hamburg still piped its drinking water raw from the Elbe after years of putting off a treatment plant; next-door Altona, which ran its supply through beds of sand first, lost far fewer people.
Q 23In Russia's cholera riots of 1830–31, mobs attacked doctors and officials for supposedly doing what?
Poisoning the people
Noxious 'bad air'
Noxious 'bad air' rising from rot and filth was blamed, so reformers fought disease by cleaning streets and airing hospitals, which helped for the wrong reason.
Q 14Which Italian anatomist isolated the cholera microbe in 1854, though his work went largely unnoticed?
Filippo Pacini
Filippo Pacini described the germ in 1854, but colleagues wedded to the miasma theory ignored him and the credit went to a rediscovery 30 years later; his name now sits in the species' formal title.
Q 15Which German scientist identified Vibrio cholerae under the microscope in 1883 as the cause of the disease?
Robert Koch
Robert Koch led a German commission that chased two outbreaks as they raged, in Africa and then in India, and came home having grown the germ in the laboratory.
Q 16Vibrio cholerae has what distinctive shape?
Comma-shaped
Comma-shaped and driven by a single whip-like tail, it bores through the mucus lining the small intestine to reach the gut wall, where it settles and multiplies.
Q 17Cholera toxin makes the gut pour out water by raising levels of which messenger molecule inside its cells?
cAMP
cAMP soars because the toxin jams a G protein switch in the 'on' position; the cell responds by pumping out salts, and water follows them into the gut.
Q 18In 1892 Max von Pettenkofer tried to show the cholera germ alone could not cause disease by doing what?
Drinking a live culture
Drinking a live culture of the cholera germ in front of witnesses left the Munich hygienist with nothing worse than mild diarrhoea, which he took as proof that the germ alone was not enough.
Q 19The seventh cholera pandemic began in 1961 in which country?
Indonesia
Indonesia's island of Sulawesi was the launch point of the El Tor strain, which leaves most of its carriers without symptoms and so travels unnoticed; as of 2025 the pandemic it started is still running.
Q 20The first cholera pandemic began in 1817 in which region of India?
Bengal
Bengal's Ganges delta had long harboured the disease; in 1817 it broke out of the delta and, carried by pilgrims, traders and British troops, went on to reach the Mediterranean.
Poisoning the people was the rumour: quarantines and armed cordons were so hated that crowds believed the authorities were tainting bread and water, and troops had to clear a St Petersburg square.
Q 24The word 'cholera' is usually traced to the Greek 'kholē', meaning what?
Bile
Bile is the likeliest root; for centuries the word covered any violent stomach upset blamed on it, and only in the 19th century did it settle on the epidemic disease arriving from Asia.
Q 25Ships with cholera aboard traditionally flew a quarantine flag of which colour?
Yellow
Yellow marked a ship in quarantine, with nobody allowed ashore; today the plain yellow signal flag means the opposite, a healthy vessel asking for clearance to enter port.
Q 26Oral rehydration solution, the simple drink used to treat cholera, is clean water mixed with salt and what?
Glucose
Glucose is the trick: the gut absorbs salt and water alongside it even while cholera is draining the body. Hemendra Nath Chatterjee first reported treating patients this way in 1953.
Q 27Oral rehydration therapy proved itself on a mass scale in 1971 among refugees from which conflict?
The Bangladesh Liberation War
The Bangladesh Liberation War drove millions into Indian camps where cholera broke out; when drip fluid ran out, Dr Dilip Mahalanabis switched to the oral drink and deaths fell sharply.
Q 28In 1892 Waldemar Haffkine developed an improved cholera vaccine and first tested it on whom?
Himself
Himself: Haffkine injected the vaccine at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in July 1892, at real risk to his life, then took it to India for mass trials.
Q 29The 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti, ten months after the earthquake, was traced to a base of UN peacekeepers from which country?
Nepal
Nepal's contingent came from a country where cholera circulates, and sewage from its base leaked into a river that thousands of Haitians used for drinking and washing.
Q 30Which German philosopher's death in Berlin in 1831 was put down to the cholera epidemic then sweeping the city?
Georg Hegel
Georg Hegel came back to Berlin that autumn believing the epidemic was over and was dead within weeks, while Schopenhauer fled the city; doctors blamed cholera, though some scholars doubt it.