What’s the Most Disgusting Thing in the World?

“Disgust is designed by evolution to keep us away from parasites that may make us sick, so people pick up on, and are most disgusted by, visual representations of a parasite invasion, such an open, festering wound,” says Valerie Curtis, the Director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

She and a team of researchers presented twenty images of things perceived as repulsive to more than 80,000 individuals from 172 countries in a survey. The images included pictures of skin abrasions and bugs such as wasps, lice, and worms. The photo that most people found gross was of a person’s gums infested with live fly larvae.

Image: Paul Venter (Wikimedia Commons).