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60 free Polio trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Polio terrified parents for half a century and was then beaten back to a handful of cases a year by two rival vaccines. This quiz covers the disease itself first: what the word poliomyelitis means, how the virus spreads, why three-quarters of infections show no symptoms at all, the three serotypes, the paralysis that gave it the name infantile paralysis, and the iron lungs that filled hospital wards in the 1940s and 1950s. The second half is the human story. Franklin Roosevelt's illness at Campobello and his rehabilitation centre at Warm Springs, Eddie Cantor's March of Dimes, the 1952 US epidemic, Jonas Salk's killed vaccine and "could you patent the sun?", the Cutter incident, Albert Sabin's oral drops on sugar cubes and his Soviet trials, and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative that has cut wild polio from 350,000 cases in 1988 to a few dozen. Easy questions suit anyone who has heard of Salk; the expert tier asks about serotypes, dates and the scientists who never got famous. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on polio, the polio vaccine, Salk, Sabin, the iron lung and the March of Dimes, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on vaccines, medicine and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Polio is caused by what kind of pathogen?
A virus
The poliovirus is an enterovirus that colonises the throat and gut before, rarely, invading the nervous system.
Q 02Roughly what share of poliovirus infections cause no symptoms at all?
About 75%
Most of the rest bring only sore throat and fever; permanent paralysis is a rare outcome.
Q 03Polio occurs naturally in which species?
Humans only
That is why eradication is possible at all: there is no animal reservoir to reseed the virus.
Q 04What is the main route by which polio spreads from person to person?
Fecal-oral
It can also pass by the oral-oral route, and infected people shed virus for up to six weeks without symptoms.
Q 05Which English physician gave the first clinical description of polio in 1789?
Michael Underwood
He described it as "a debility of the lower extremities".
Q 06Which Austrian immunologist, famed for discovering blood groups, identified the poliovirus in 1909?
Karl Landsteiner
He is best remembered for the ABO blood group system, which won him a Nobel Prize.
Q 07In October 2023, wild poliovirus was still endemic in which two countries?
Pakistan and Afghanistan
A fake CIA vaccination clinic in Abbottabad in 2011 destroyed local trust in vaccinators.
Q 08The Greek root polios in the word poliomyelitis means what?
Grey
With myelos (marrow), it names inflammation of the grey matter of the spinal cord.
Q 09How many serotypes of wild poliovirus have been identified?
Three
Type 2 was certified eradicated in 2015 and type 3 in 2019; only type 1 remains in the wild.
Q 10Which wild poliovirus strain was certified as eradicated in 2015?
Type 2
Type 3 followed in 2019, leaving type 1 as the only wild strain still circulating.
Q 11Which part of the body does paralytic polio most often affect?
The legs
Depending on the site, paralytic polio is classed as spinal, bulbar or bulbospinal.
Q 12What name is given to muscle weakness appearing decades after recovery from the disease?
Post-polio syndrome
It affects 25 to 50 percent of childhood survivors of paralytic polio and is not infectious.
Q 13What is the popular name for the negative-pressure ventilator used to keep polio patients breathing?
Iron lung
The patient's head stays outside while the pressure inside the cylinder is cycled up and down.
Q 21Under what name was the March of Dimes founded by Roosevelt in 1938?
National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis
Basil O'Connor ran it for more than three decades and built over 3,100 county chapters.
Q 22Which entertainer coined the name "March of Dimes" as a pun on a newsreel series?
Eddie Cantor
He was punning on The March of Time; within days the White House mailroom was swamped with 2,680,000 dimes.
Q 23The first March of Dimes appeal asked Americans to send dimes to the White House ahead of what date?
Roosevelt's birthday
Q 14Louis Shaw and which Harvard professor developed the first widely used negative-pressure respirator?
Philip Drinker
It was powered by an electric motor and air pumps taken from two vacuum cleaners.
Q 15The Drinker respirator was first used clinically in 1928 on an eight-year-old girl in which city?
Boston
She recovered within a minute of being placed in the chamber, which helped popularise the device.
Q 16A cheaper, lighter tank respirator called the Both respirator was invented in 1938 in which country?
Australia
William Morris, Lord Nuffield, paid to make Both-Nuffield respirators and gave them to hospitals across the British Empire.
Q 17The Drinker respirator was initially developed to treat victims of what?
Coal gas poisoning
Polio made it famous only later, in the epidemics of the mid-20th century.
Q 18Which future US president was diagnosed with polio in 1921 at age 39?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
A 2003 study argued his illness may actually have been Guillain-Barre syndrome.
Q 19Roosevelt fell ill in August 1921 at his family's holiday home on which island?
Campobello
He had fallen into the cold Bay of Fundy the day before the chills and back pain began.
Q 20Roosevelt bought a Georgia resort in 1926 to turn it into a polio rehabilitation centre. What was it called?
Warm Springs
He taught himself a swivelling "two-point walk" there in iron braces, gripping a strong companion's arm.
Lapel pins were sold for ten cents each, and 80,000 letters arrived by 29 January 1938.
Q 24Who developed the inactivated (injected) polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh?
Jonas Salk
He announced it as safe on 12 April 1955 and famously declined to patent it.
Q 25Asked on television who owned the patent on his vaccine, Salk replied "Could you patent the ..." what?
Sun
The vaccine has been estimated at 7 billion dollars had it been patented; lawyers found no patentable novelty anyway.
Q 26Which broadcaster told Salk "Young man, a great tragedy has befallen you — you've lost your anonymity"?
Edward R. Murrow
Salk had wanted to stay private, and the 1955 media onslaught made that impossible.
Q 27What is the Salk vaccine's virus treated with to inactivate it?
Formalin
The virus is grown in monkey kidney tissue culture before being chemically killed.
Q 28Which scientist led the 1954 field trial of Salk's vaccine, then the largest medical experiment ever?
Thomas Francis
It eventually involved 1.8 million children in 44 states, and Francis had been Salk's mentor in influenza research.
Q 29What were the roughly one million children who tested Salk's vaccine in 1954 nicknamed?
Polio Pioneers
Salk had already injected 43 children in 1952 and his own children in 1953.
Q 30In 1955 improperly inactivated vaccine from which pharmaceutical company caused 260 cases of polio?
Cutter
Eleven children died, and the scandal tarnished the injected vaccine in the public mind.