Public Health Trivia Questions
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97 free Public Health trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 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 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01John Snow traced the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak to a public water pump on which street?
Broad Street
Broad Street's brewery workers were spared: they drank their beer allowance instead of pump water, one of the oddities that pointed Snow to the well.
Q 02Which explanation of disease did John Snow's cholera work help discredit?
Miasma
Miasma theory blamed cholera on foul air rising from rotting matter; Snow argued instead that it was swallowed in water tainted by sewage, and his map of deaths around one pump made the case.
Q 03Ignaz Semmelweis cut childbed fever deaths in 1847 by having doctors wash their hands in what?
Chlorinated lime solution
Chlorinated lime solution cut deaths on his ward from about 18% to under 2% within months; he had realised that students were carrying infection on their hands straight from the dissecting room.
Q 04The 'Semmelweis reflex' describes what?
Rejecting new evidence that contradicts established beliefs
Rejecting new evidence that contradicts established beliefs is named for Ignaz Semmelweis, whose proof that handwashing saved mothers' lives was dismissed by the leading doctors of his day.
Q 05In 1796 Jenner inoculated James Phipps with material from which disease to protect against smallpox?
Cowpox
Cowpox matter came from blisters on the hand of dairymaid Sarah Nelmes; the Latin vaccinus, 'of a cow', is why such jabs have been called vaccines ever since.
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 07Official stocks of live smallpox virus are held only at the CDC in Atlanta and a lab in which country?
Russia
Russia's Vector Institute holds the other stock; after eradication every other laboratory had to destroy its samples or hand them over to one of the two.
Q 08Robert Koch's postulates, formulated in 1884, are criteria for establishing what?
That a microbe causes a specific disease
That a microbe causes a specific disease takes four tests, but the first, that the germ is never found in healthy people, proved too strict: Koch himself met symptom-free carriers of cholera.
Q 09Which kind of chart, nicknamed the 'coxcomb', did Nightingale use to show Crimean War deaths?
Polar area diagram
Polar area diagram wedges each stood for a month, their area showing how many soldiers died; the picture made plain that preventable disease, not wounds, was the army's great killer.
Q 10'Typhoid Mary' Mallon, a healthy carrier who infected household after household with typhoid, worked in what job?
Cook
Cook Mary Mallon was freed in 1910 on condition that she never handle food again; by 1915 she was cooking at a maternity hospital under a false name, and she was confined for the rest of her life.
Q 11Why was the influenza of 1918 nicknamed the 'Spanish flu'?
Neutral Spain's uncensored press reported it freely
Neutral Spain's uncensored press reported it freely, even when King Alfonso XIII fell ill, while the nations at war censored news of their own outbreaks to protect morale.
Q 12Which 1918 event in Philadelphia became a notorious super-spreader, followed by about 12,000 deaths?
A Liberty Loans parade
A Liberty Loans parade packed some 200,000 people together after the city's health director let it go ahead; within 72 hours every bed in Philadelphia's 31 hospitals was full.
Q 13The 1954 trial that enrolled more than a million children as 'Polio Pioneers' tested which scientist's injected vaccine?
Q 21Six weeks after declaring COVID-19 a global health emergency, the WHO first described it on 11 March 2020 with which word?
Pandemic
Pandemic was a word WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said should not be used lightly; he chose it on 11 March, citing 'alarming levels of spread and severity' and of inaction.
Q 22The Framingham Heart Study, begun in 1948, is credited with coining which everyday medical term?
Risk factor
Risk factor is a term the study gave medicine as it showed that high blood pressure and cholesterol predict heart disease; it now follows the grandchildren of its original 1948 volunteers.
Q 23In the Tuskegee study of 1932 to 1972, US health officials left hundreds of Black men untreated for which disease?
Syphilis
Jonas Salk
Jonas Salk never patented it or earned money from it; asked on television who owned the vaccine, he said the people did, adding, 'Could you patent the sun?'
Q 14Which charity paid for the polio vaccine research and promoted the mass immunisation drive of the 1950s?
The March of Dimes
The March of Dimes grew out of the foundation that Franklin Roosevelt, himself diagnosed with polio in 1921, created in 1938; its small-change appeals raised the money for the vaccine research.
Q 15Which US city began the first controlled water-fluoridation experiment on 25 January 1945?
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Grand Rapids, Michigan was paired with untreated Muskegon nearby; within 11 years tooth decay among its children had fallen by more than 60 percent.
Q 16Dentist Frederick McKay traced the 'Colorado brown stain' on residents' teeth to what cause?
Drinking water
Drinking water in the region was naturally rich in fluoride, which mottled the enamel brown yet left those teeth surprisingly resistant to decay, the clue that led to fluoridation.
Q 17The CDC was founded in 1946 primarily to fight which disease in the American South?
Malaria
Malaria was still endemic in the South, which is why the agency was based in Atlanta; it started with fewer than 400 staff and trucks, sprayers and shovels for a war on mosquitoes.
Q 18Which pesticide, a wartime weapon against disease-carrying insects, was banned from US farms in 1972 after the book Silent Spring?
DDT
DDT won Paul Müller the 1948 Nobel Prize in medicine for finding its power to kill the insects that spread disease; 24 years later the US withdrew it over the harm to wildlife.
Q 19The 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.
Q 20The 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration named what as the key to achieving 'Health for All' by the year 2000?
Primary health care
Primary health care, basic services close to where people live, drew part of its inspiration from China's 'barefoot doctors', villagers given basic medical training to treat their neighbours.
Syphilis went untreated even after penicillin became the treatment of choice in the 1940s; the study stopped only when a 1972 Associated Press story caused a public outcry.
Q 24Which whistleblower leaked the Tuskegee study to the Associated Press in 1972?
Peter Buxtun
Peter Buxtun, a Public Health Service employee, had protested inside the agency since 1966 and been turned down twice before he took the story to a reporter.
Q 25After the Surgeon General's 1964 smoking report, Congress required what on every cigarette pack?
A health warning
A health warning, 'Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health', was required by a 1965 law; a second law then took cigarette advertising off American television and radio.
Q 26Why was the 1964 Surgeon General's smoking report released on a Saturday?
To limit its effect on the stock market
To limit its effect on the stock market, and to catch the Sunday papers, the report came out on a Saturday; it drew on more than 7,000 scientific articles and was front-page news across the country.
Q 27In epidemiology, what does R0 (the basic reproduction number) measure?
New cases caused by each case
New cases caused by each case, in a population where nobody is yet immune: above 1 an outbreak grows, below 1 it dies out.
Q 28Which disease is so contagious that roughly 95% of a community must be immune to stop it spreading?
Measles
Measles virus stays infectious in the air for up to two hours after a cough or sneeze, and a single case can infect up to 18 other people.
Q 29Which research design follows disease-free people forward in time according to their exposure?
Cohort
Cohort studies borrow the name of a Roman army unit of a few hundred soldiers: a group enrolled together and followed as it marches forward through time.
Q 30The word 'epidemiology' comes from Greek roots meaning the study of what?
What is upon the people
What is upon the people: epi (upon), demos (people) and logos (study); the Greek word epidemia first meant a stay in a place, then the sickness that came to stay.