Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Malaria trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Malaria has killed more humans than perhaps any other disease, and this trivia quiz covers the science, the history and the fight against it. The biology questions explain the Plasmodium life cycle, which species does the killing, why Anopheles is the only mosquito that matters, how sickle cell trait protects and why the parasite is so hard to vaccinate against. The history runs from Roman fever and the miasma that gave the disease its name to Laveran spotting the parasite in 1880, Ronald Ross's mosquito dissection of 1897 and the Italian team who proved human transmission a year later. The treatment questions cover cinchona bark and the Countess of Chinchón, the isolation of quinine, the gin and tonic, Bayer's chloroquine, Tu Youyou's rediscovery of artemisinin from a 4th-century Chinese text, and the two vaccines endorsed by the WHO. There are also questions on DDT, bednets, the eradication campaigns, World Malaria Day, the Panama Canal and the psychiatrist who won a Nobel Prize for deliberately infecting patients. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on malaria, its parasites, drugs and discoverers, and each question links to its source. Try our Vaccines and Infectious Diseases quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which sex of Anopheles mosquito transmits malaria?
Only the females
Females need blood meals, and the bite injects parasites from the mosquito's saliva.
Q 02The word malaria comes from medieval Italian words meaning what?
Bad air
It was also called ague, paludism and marsh fever, and appeared in English at least as early as 1768.
Q 03How many Plasmodium species cause malaria in humans?
Six
P. ovale is now split into two species, curtisi and wallikeri.
Q 04P. falciparum accounts for roughly what share of identified human malaria infections?
About 75%
The next most common species accounts for most of the rest and dominates outside Africa.
Q 05Which Plasmodium species is a macaque malaria that infects thousands of people a year?
P. knowlesi
It is the only ape or monkey malaria of real public-health importance in humans.
Q 06Symptoms of malaria usually begin how long after the infective bite?
10 to 15 days
The parasites multiply silently in the liver first; all symptoms come from the red-blood-cell stage.
Q 07Each infected liver cell can end up harbouring up to how many parasites before it bursts?
40,000
After 5 to 25 days the cells break down and release merozoites into the blood.
Q 08What is the mobile form of the parasite that a mosquito injects into a new host called?
Sporozoite
Merozoites are the smaller form released from the liver to invade red blood cells.
Q 09Two of the species can hide in the liver as a dormant stage that reactivates months later. What is it called?
Hypnozoite
This is why those species cause true relapses even after the blood has been cleared.
Q 10Untreated cerebral malaria can kill within how long of the first symptoms?
Forty-eight hours
Infected red cells block capillaries in the brain and damage the blood-brain barrier.
Q 11"Blackwater fever" in severe malaria describes what?
Haemoglobin from burst red cells discolouring the urine
It often precedes kidney failure.
Q 12Roughly how many people caught malaria worldwide in 2024?
282 million
An estimated 610,000 of them died, the great majority in sub-Saharan Africa.
Q 13What share of malaria cases and deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa?
95%
Nigeria, the DR Congo, Uganda, Ethiopia and Mozambique together account for more than half.
Q 21Which Cuban doctor showed in 1881 that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever?
Carlos Finlay
His and Ross's findings were confirmed by Walter Reed's board in 1900.
Q 22The first effective malaria treatment came from the bark of which tree?
Cinchona
It grows on the Andean slopes, mainly in Peru, and the Jesuits brought the remedy to Europe around 1640.
Q 23Linnaeus named the quinine-bark tree genus in 1742 after a tale of which noblewoman's 1638 cure?
The Countess of Chinchón
She was vicereine of Peru; Linnaeus used the Italian spelling and the tale is doubted today.
Q 14Which inherited blood condition gives carriers partial protection against malaria?
Sickle cell trait
Infected red cells sickle and are removed from circulation before the parasite can complete its cycle.
Q 15The absence of which blood-group marker on red blood cells gives resistance to malaria?
Duffy
Thalassaemia traits and G6PD deficiency are other protective genetic factors.
Q 16Who first observed malaria parasites inside red blood cells, in Algeria in 1880?
Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran
It was the first time a protist was identified as causing disease; he won the 1907 Nobel Prize.
Q 17In which city did Ronald Ross prove in 1897 that mosquitoes transmit malaria, working with birds?
Calcutta
He found the parasite in a mosquito's gut on 20 August 1897 and won the 1902 Nobel Prize.
Q 18How much did Ross pay his patient Husein Khan per blood-fed mosquito during his 1897 experiments?
One anna
He cultured 20 adult "brown" mosquitoes from larvae and dissected them after feeding.
Q 19Besides medicine, Ross was a polymath who did what?
Wrote poems, novels and songs
He had wanted to be a writer and spent much of medical school composing music and plays.
Q 20Which Italian team proved in 1898 that infected mosquitoes transmit malaria to humans?
Bignami, Grassi and Bastianelli
Grassi showed that only Anopheles mosquitoes could transmit human malaria.
Q 24Which two French chemists isolated and named quinine in 1820?
Pelletier and Caventou
Bark extracts had been used since at least 1632, and quinine ruled until the 1920s.
Q 25On a bar's soda gun, tonic water is marked with which letter, standing for quinine?
Q
Tonic was first sold in 1858 as a way of delivering anti-malarial quinine.
Q 26British officers in which country are credited with inventing the gin and tonic?
India
They also added lime to fend off scurvy; American Civil War surgeons preferred quinine with whisky.
Q 27Chloroquine was discovered in 1934 at which company's laboratories, under the name resochin?
Bayer
It was shelved for a decade as too toxic before replacing quinine in the 1940s.
Q 28Where did chloroquine-resistant P. falciparum first appear in the 1950s?
Southeast Asia and South America
Resistance had spread globally by the 1980s.
Q 29Artemisinin, discovered by Tu Youyou, is extracted from which plant?
Artemisia annua, sweet wormwood
Chinese herbalists had used the plant for 2,000 years.
Q 30Tu Youyou was guided by a 4th-century Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments by which author?
Ge Hong
Its recipe used cold extraction, which turned out to be the key: hot water destroyed the active compound.