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50 free Public Health trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
44 free public health trivia questions with answers. These public health trivia questions cover the field's landmark stories: John Snow and the Broad Street pump, Semmelweis and handwashing, Jenner and the eradication of smallpox, Pasteur, Koch and Nightingale, Typhoid Mary, the 1918 flu, Salk and Sabin, water fluoridation, the founding of the CDC and WHO, the 1964 Surgeon General's report, the Framingham study, the Tuskegee study and the ethics reforms it forced, seat-belt laws, oral rehydration therapy and the core ideas of epidemiology such as herd immunity and R0. They suit MPH orientation weeks, National Public Health Week events, health-department staff socials and pub quizzes with a science round. Difficulty runs from easy history to details only epidemiologists will know. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia and agency sources before publishing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01John Snow traced the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak to a public water pump where?
Broad Street
His dot map of cases helped overturn the miasma theory; he also gave Queen Victoria chloroform in childbirth.
Q 02Which explanation of disease, blaming 'bad air', did John Snow's cholera work help discredit?
Miasma
Officials replaced the pump handle after the outbreak faded and initially rejected his water-borne explanation.
Q 03Ignaz Semmelweis cut childbed fever deaths in 1847 by having doctors wash their hands in what?
Chlorinated lime solution
Mortality on his ward fell from 18.3% to 1.2% within months, yet colleagues rejected him and he died in an asylum in 1865.
Q 04The 'Semmelweis reflex' describes what?
Rejecting new evidence that contradicts established beliefs
The term is a nod to the physicians who were offended by the suggestion that their hands were unclean.
Q 05In 1796 Jenner inoculated James Phipps with material from which disease to protect against smallpox?
Cowpox
The pus came from milkmaid Sarah Nelmes and a cow named Blossom; 'vaccine' derives from the Latin for cow.
Q 06In which year did the WHO certify smallpox eradicated, the only human disease ever wiped out?
1980
The last natural case was Somali cook Ali Maow Maalin in 1977; the disease had killed around 300 million people in the 20th century.
Q 07Live smallpox virus is kept only at the CDC in Atlanta and a lab in which country?
Russia
The Vector Institute holds Russia's stock; any research needs WHO approval.
Q 08Which French scientist developed the first rabies vaccine, given to nine-year-old Joseph Meister in 1885?
Louis Pasteur
He also disproved spontaneous generation with swan-neck flasks and gave his name to pasteurisation.
Q 09Robert Koch's postulates, formulated in 1884, are criteria for establishing what?
That a microbe causes a specific disease
Koch himself relaxed the first postulate after finding healthy carriers of cholera and typhoid.
Q 10Which kind of chart, nicknamed the 'coxcomb', did Nightingale use to show Crimean War deaths?
Polar area diagram
In 1859 she became the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society; International Nurses Day falls on her birthday, 12 May.
Q 11'Typhoid Mary' Mallon, the first identified healthy carrier of typhoid in the US, worked in what job?
Cook
Investigator George Soper found she had cooked for eight families, seven of which had typhoid outbreaks; she spent 26 years quarantined on North Brother Island.
Q 12Why was the 1918 influenza pandemic nicknamed the 'Spanish flu'?
Neutral Spain's uncensored press reported it freely
The first confirmed case was actually at Camp Funston, Kansas, in March 1918; the H1N1 virus infected about a third of the world.
Q 13Which 1918 event in Philadelphia became a notorious super-spreader, followed by about 12,000 deaths?
Q 21The 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration, which launched the 'Health for All by 2000' goal, focused on what?
Primary care
The WHO-UNICEF conference was held in what is now Almaty, Kazakhstan; a 40th-anniversary meeting in Astana renewed the pledge in 2018.
Q 22On what date did the WHO declare COVID-19 a Public Health Emergency of International Concern?
30 January 2020
The pandemic declaration followed on 11 March; the emergency programme that handled it dated from the 2016 post-Ebola reforms.
Q 23The Framingham Heart Study, begun in 1948, is credited with coining which everyday medical term?
Risk factor
A Liberty Loans parade
The pandemic was unusual for killing young adults; most deaths came from secondary bacterial pneumonia.
Q 14The Salk polio vaccine trial of 1954 enrolled about how many children, known as 'Polio Pioneers'?
1.8 million
Results announced on 12 April 1955 showed the injected vaccine worked; Sabin's oral sugar-cube version arrived in 1961.
Q 15Which charity's immunisation drive cut US polio cases from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 by 1957?
The March of Dimes
The last US cases from wild virus were among the Amish in 1979; global cases fell from 350,000 in 1988 to 33 in 2018.
Q 16Which US city began the first controlled water-fluoridation experiment on 25 January 1945?
Grand Rapids, Michigan
The CDC later listed fluoridation among the ten great public health achievements of the 20th century; about 72% of Americans drink fluoridated water.
Q 17Which dentist spent thirty years studying the 'Colorado brown stain' that revealed fluoride's effect?
Frederick McKay
H. Trendley Dean of the NIH then led the epidemiological studies that set the stage for fluoridation.
Q 18The CDC was founded in 1946 primarily to fight which disease in the American South?
Malaria
It succeeded the wartime Malaria Control in War Areas programme and bought its Atlanta land from Emory for a token $10.
Q 19Which Coca-Cola chairman helped the CDC acquire its Atlanta campus for a $10 token payment to Emory?
Robert Woodruff
The agency's Epidemic Intelligence Service, its 'disease detectives', began in 1951.
Q 20The World Health Organization was founded on 7 April of which year, a date now marked as World Health Day?
1948
Its headquarters are in Geneva and its first director-general was Canadian psychiatrist Brock Chisholm.
It began with 5,209 Massachusetts residents and showed smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure and obesity raise heart-disease risk.
Q 24The Tuskegee study, in which Black men were left with untreated syphilis, ran for how many years?
40
From 1932 to 1972; penicillin had been standard treatment since 1947, and the scandal led to the 1974 National Research Act and the Belmont Report.
Q 25Which whistleblower leaked the Tuskegee study to the Associated Press in 1972?
Peter Buxtun
President Clinton formally apologised to the survivors in 1997.
Q 26Which US Surgeon General released the landmark 1964 report linking smoking to lung cancer?
Luther Terry
It was released on a Saturday to soften the stock-market impact and led to warning labels in 1965 and a broadcast ad ban.
Q 27Why was the 1964 Surgeon General's smoking report deliberately released on a Saturday?
To limit its effect on the stock market
The committee reviewed more than 7,000 scientific articles and found smokers had 10 to 20 times the lung-cancer risk.
Q 28In epidemiology, what does R0 (the basic reproduction number) measure?
Cases one case generates in a susceptible population
If R0 is above 1 an outbreak grows; measles has an R0 of about 12 to 18.
Q 29Roughly what share of a population must be immune to reach the herd immunity threshold for measles?
Over 95%
The threshold is 1 minus 1/R0, and measles is one of the most contagious diseases known.
Q 30Which research design follows disease-free people forward in time according to their exposure?
Cohort
Case-control studies look backwards from diseased and healthy groups and report odds ratios; cohorts report relative risk.