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50 free Tuberculosis trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This tuberculosis trivia quiz covers the disease that killed a quarter of Europe in the nineteenth century and still kills more people than any other single infection today. The easy questions cover the bacterium, the way it spreads, the organ it usually attacks, the old name consumption and the man who found the cause. From there the quiz moves through the history: Hippocrates and phthisis, Egyptian mummies with tubercular spines, kings touching the scrofulous, the vampire panics of New England, the first sanatorium in Silesia and the anti-spitting campaigns. The hard end covers the science and the modern fight: how slowly the bacillus divides, the granuloma that gives the disease its name, the tuberculin Koch wrongly sold as a cure, Calmette and Guerin's vaccine, the Rutgers student who isolated streptomycin, the four first-line drugs, MDR and XDR strains, the Xpert test, World TB Day, the countries carrying most of the burden and the WHO's End TB targets. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for tuberculosis, streptomycin, scrofula, sanatoria and Christmas seals before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our human body, medicine and pandemics quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which species of bacterium is the usual cause of TB?
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Its waxy, lipid-rich cell wall means it barely takes up a Gram stain at all.
Q 02By what name was tuberculosis most commonly known in nineteenth-century English?
Consumption
The word comes from Latin roots meaning to take up completely from under.
Q 03How does tuberculosis usually spread?
Through the air when an infected person coughs
The droplets can stay airborne and infective for hours in a poorly ventilated room.
Q 04Which organ does active tuberculosis most commonly involve, in about 90% of cases?
The lungs
In 15 to 20% of active cases it spreads elsewhere, causing forms such as Pott disease of the spine.
Q 05Who identified the bacillus that causes tuberculosis in 1882?
Robert Koch
He won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery, and the date is now World TB Day.
Q 06On what date is World Tuberculosis Day marked each year?
24 March
It is the anniversary of Koch's original scientific announcement.
Q 07Roughly what fraction of the world's population is estimated to have latent tuberculosis?
One-quarter
That is about 2 billion people; without treatment 5 to 15% of them will develop active disease in their lifetime.
Q 08Can people with latent tuberculosis infect others?
No, they are not contagious
Most infections never produce symptoms at all.
Q 09Which vaccine, first used in 1921, was still the only licensed TB vaccine as of 2025?
BCG
Bacille Calmette-Guerin was first used on humans in France in 1921 and uses an attenuated bovine strain; newer candidates such as M72/AS01E were still in trials in 2025.
Q 10In what year did Calmette and Guerin achieve the first genuine success in immunising against tuberculosis?
1906
Their vaccine only won wide acceptance in the US, Britain and Germany after World War II.
Q 11Which antibiotic, developed in the 1940s, first made a cure for tuberculosis a reality?
Streptomycin
Rates were already falling thanks to sanitation and vaccination before it arrived.
Q 12Which PhD student first isolated the first anti-TB antibiotic in 1943 in Selman Waksman's lab?
Albert Schatz
He later sued Waksman for credit and royalties, settling for 3% against Waksman's 10%.
Q 13In which year did Selman Waksman win the Nobel Prize for the first anti-TB antibiotic?
1952
The citation called it the first antibiotic active against tuberculosis.
Q 21The tuberculin skin screening injected into the forearm is named after which physician?
Mantoux
Prior BCG vaccination can give a false positive, which is why interferon-gamma release assays are used as follow-up.
Q 22Which ancient Greek physician described phthisis, generally equated with tuberculosis, around 400 BCE?
Hippocrates
He called it a disease of dry seasons; the Indian Vedas refer to a similar wasting illness, yaksma.
Q 23Researchers have found tubercular decay in the spines of Egyptian mummies dating from roughly when?
3000 to 2400 BCE
Earlier evidence still goes back to the early Neolithic, some 10,000 years ago.
Q 14How long is the usual course of first-line drug treatment for tuberculosis?
Six months
After about two weeks of effective treatment most patients stop being contagious, but stopping early breeds resistance.
Q 15Which of these is one of the four first-line tuberculosis drugs?
Rifampicin
The others are isoniazid, pyrazinamide and ethambutol.
Q 16Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis is defined as resistance to which two drugs?
Rifampicin and isoniazid
Extensively drug-resistant TB adds resistance to a fluoroquinolone and another Group A drug.
Q 17How often does the TB bacillus divide, making it unusually slow-growing?
Every 16 to 20 hours
Most bacteria manage it in under an hour, which is one reason TB cultures take weeks.
Q 18The disease takes its name from the tubercle, which is what?
A small white nodule formed by a granuloma
Immune cells wall off infected macrophages, and the centre of the nodule dies.
Q 19Which type of immune cell does the TB bacterium colonise and survive inside after being engulfed?
Alveolar macrophage
It can survive and replicate inside the phagosome, eventually destroying the cell that swallowed it.
Q 20Koch's 1890 'remedy' tuberculin failed as a cure but was later adapted into what?
A skin test for infection
A skin test injects a little of it into the forearm to screen high-risk people.
Q 24Roughly what proportion of all deaths in Europe did tuberculosis cause at its nineteenth-century peak?
A quarter
In 1815 one in four deaths in England was down to the disease; by 1918 it was still one in six in France.
Q 25What was scrofula historically called because monarchs were thought able to cure it by touch?
The king's evil
The touchings began under Philip I of France and Henry I of England; the patient received a gold coin called an angel.
Q 26Deaths from tuberculosis in 19th-century New England were associated in folklore with what?
Vampires
People believed the first family member to die was draining the life from the rest.
Q 27Who opened the first tuberculosis sanatorium, in 1859, in Silesia?
Hermann Brehmer
Even at the best sanatoria around 1916, half of those admitted were dead within five years.
Q 28Where was the first tuberculosis sanatorium in North America established, in 1885?
Saranac Lake, New York
The Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium became a model for the fresh-air cure across the continent.
Q 29Which Thomas Mann novel is set in a tuberculosis sanatorium?
The Magic Mountain
Puccini's La boheme and Verdi's La Traviata put the disease on the opera stage.
Q 30Which of these Romantic poets is listed among the famous figures who had tuberculosis?
John Keats
Chopin, Chekhov, Kafka, Charlotte Bronte, Orwell and Modigliani are on the same grim roll call.