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50 free Diseases trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every disease has a story, and the best ones are about people: the doctor who was laughed out of a conference for blaming mosquitoes, the sled dog whose 260-mile run saved a town, the president who hid his diagnosis, the queen who unknowingly passed a bleeding disorder to half the thrones of Europe. This quiz sticks to the history rather than the biology. Expect the discoverers and the dates, the scientists whose names became diagnoses, the vaccines that changed everything, the two diseases humanity has actually wiped out, and the famous patients whose illnesses made the news. Nothing here needs a medical degree, just a good memory and a taste for a surprising fact. It suits a family quiz night, a classroom warm-up or a pub round where everyone knows a little and nobody knows it all. Play it in one sitting or print it out for later.
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Q 01Abraham Lincoln was coming down with smallpox when he gave which famous speech in November 1863?
The Gettysburg Address
The Gettysburg Address was delivered while Lincoln was, modern clinicians believe, already incubating smallpox; a mild case with a rash followed within days.
Q 02Which Cambridge graduate, sent home by the plague of 1665, worked out gravity at Woolsthorpe?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton spent the two plague years at his family home developing calculus, optics and the law of gravitation, all before he turned 25.
Q 03The viral 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge raised $100 million in weeks for research into which disease?
ALS
ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, had been heard of by only half of Americans before the stunt, the ALS Association said. Monthly views of its Wikipedia page jumped from 163,000 to 2.89 million.
Q 04Anne Frank is believed to have died at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945 of which louse-borne disease?
Typhus
Typhus swept Bergen-Belsen in an epidemic that killed some 17,000 prisoners, and witnesses recalled Anne and her sister Margot showing symptoms by February. Their exact date of death is unknown.
Q 05Which lead dog of musher Leonhard Seppala ran over 260 miles of the 1925 diphtheria serum relay to Nome?
Togo
Togo covered far more of the trail than any other lead dog, across its most treacherous stretches, yet the news went to Balto, who ran the final leg. A Disney film finally told his story in 2019.
Q 06Which nickname for Britons came from the Royal Navy adding citrus juice to sailors' grog against scurvy?
Limey
Limey began as 'lime-juicer' in the 1850s, a jibe at Royal Navy sailors. Switching from lemons to colony-grown limes was a blunder: limes hold only half the vitamin C.
Q 07Which Back to the Future star, diagnosed with Parkinson's in 1991, kept it secret until 1998?
Michael J. Fox
Michael J. Fox was warned he had 'ten good working years left', so he hastily signed a three-film deal. In 2000 he founded a foundation to fund Parkinson's research.
Q 08Which former US president's centre has led the drive to wipe out Guinea worm disease since 1986?
Jimmy Carter
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.
Q 09The CDC was founded in 1946 in which US city, chosen because its first mission was fighting malaria in the South?
Atlanta
Atlanta got the Communicable Disease Center because malaria was endemic across the Southern United States. In 1947 Emory University sold the agency 15 acres for a token ten dollars.
Q 10Which US president announced his Alzheimer's diagnosis in a handwritten letter to the nation in 1994?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan was diagnosed in August 1994 and went public that November, nearly six years after leaving office. He lived another decade, dying in 2004.
Q 11Which boxer, his arm trembling from Parkinson's, lit the cauldron at the 1996 Summer Olympics?
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali had made his Parkinson's diagnosis public in 1984, three years after his last fight. At those Games he was handed a replacement for the 1960 Olympic gold he said he had thrown into the Ohio River.
Q 12Which royal made headlines in 1987 by holding hands with an AIDS patient to fight the stigma?
Princess Diana
Princess Diana had opened the UK's first dedicated AIDS unit, at London's Middlesex Hospital, that same year, and was named Woman of the Year 1987 for the effort.
Q 13Which Los Angeles Lakers star stunned sport in November 1991 by announcing he had contracted HIV?
Magic Johnson
Q 21The first immortal human cell line, grown from a cervical cancer patient's tumour in 1951, is known by what name?
HeLa
HeLa cells came from Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old woman treated at Johns Hopkins who died of her cancer in October 1951; earlier human cultures had survived only days. Jonas Salk used them to test the first polio vaccine.
Q 22The haemophilia of Alexei, son of Tsar Nicholas II, gave which self-styled holy man his hold at court?
Rasputin
Grigori Rasputin began acting as the boy's faith healer in late 1906, and the empress's belief that he alone could ease Alexei's bleeding fed the scandals that helped bring down the Romanovs.
Q 23Which British queen, an unknowing carrier of haemophilia, passed the 'royal disease' to dynasties across Europe?
Victoria
Magic Johnson retired on the spot but returned within months to win MVP of the 1992 All-Star Game and co-captain the Olympic 'Dream Team' in Barcelona.
Q 14Which oil, long spooned into reluctant children, was confirmed in the 1920s to prevent rickets?
Cod liver oil
Cod liver oil works because it is rich in vitamin D, shown in 1920 to be what rickets sufferers lacked. German doctors had noticed as early as the 1820s that children given it stayed free of the disease.
Q 15Which US president, his legs paralysed by illness in 1921, founded the charity that became the March of Dimes?
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt launched it in 1938 as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to fight polio; comedian Eddie Cantor coined the catchier name as a pun on the newsreel The March of Time.
Q 16Which 'This Land Is Your Land' folk singer died in 1967 of Huntington's disease, inherited from his mother?
Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie's mother had been institutionalised with the same disease while he was a teenager, and his first two daughters died of it too.
Q 17Which priest, canonised in 2009, served Hawaii's Molokai leprosy colony from 1873 until his death in 1889?
Father Damien
Father Damien, born Jozef De Veuster in Belgium, arrived at Kalaupapa to find 600 patients and caught leprosy himself after eleven years there. Pope Benedict XVI canonised him on 11 October 2009.
Q 18Lupus takes its name from the Latin for which animal, whose bite its rash was thought to resemble?
Wolf
Wolf is 'lupus' in Latin, a name attached to the disease in the 13th century. Singer Selena Gomez is among its best-known sufferers today.
Q 19Zika virus, a global alarm in 2015-16, was first isolated in 1947 from a caged monkey in which country?
Uganda
Uganda's Ziika Forest gave the virus its name after researchers isolated it from a caged rhesus macaque in April 1947. Human infection was not documented until 1952.
Q 20'Mad cow disease', or BSE, was first confirmed in cattle in 1986 in which country?
Britain
Britain saw more than 184,000 cattle diagnosed between 1986 and 2015, spread by feeding meat-and-bone meal to calves. Some countries long barred blood donors who had lived there in the 1980s and 90s.
Queen Victoria spread the mutation through her daughters Alice and Beatrice into the royal houses of Spain and Germany, and on to the Romanovs. Tests on Romanov remains suggest it was the rarer haemophilia B.
Q 24Which Romantic poet, once a surgeon-apothecary's apprentice, died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821, aged 25?
John Keats
John Keats had been in print for less than four years; Shelley loudly blamed his death on savage reviews in the Quarterly Review rather than on his lungs.
Q 25Max Theiler won the 1951 Nobel Prize in Medicine for a 1937 vaccine against which mosquito-borne disease?
Yellow fever
Yellow fever made Theiler, born in South Africa, the first African-born Nobel laureate. His weakened '17D' strain, bred through more than 100 passages in chicken embryos, is still the basis of the vaccine.
Q 26Which British doctor found the malaria parasite inside a mosquito in India in 1897, earning the 1902 Nobel Prize?
Ross
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.
Q 27Which doctor argued in 1881 that a mosquito spread the disease Walter Reed's team confirmed in 1900?
Carlos Finlay
Carlos Finlay presented the theory at the 1881 International Sanitary Conference and was met with ridicule and mockery. A year later he even named the culprit, a mosquito of the genus Aedes.
Q 28British officials in colonial India mixed which bitter anti-malaria drug with soda and sugar, creating tonic water?
Quinine
Quinine from cinchona bark was so bitter that the British also mixed their tonic with gin, giving the world the gin and tonic. The first commercial tonic water was patented in London in 1858.
Q 29Spain's 1803 Balmis Expedition kept the smallpox vaccine alive across the Atlantic by carrying it in whom?
Orphan boys
Orphan boys sailed with the expedition so the vaccine could be passed arm to arm; three enslaved girls from Cuba carried it for part of the route. Hundreds of thousands were vaccinated across the Spanish empire.
Q 30Apart from a CDC lab in the United States, the only site allowed to keep live smallpox virus is in which country?
Russia
Russia's Vector Institute at Koltsovo and the CDC hold the last two official stocks, kept after the WHO had every other sample destroyed or handed over. Debate over destroying even these has run for decades.