Vers Rinaires

Being sworn, as a conscientious humanist, to look up all the unfamiliar words and phrases in a work I'm reading for the first time, I was obliged to discover, if I could, what it meant that our nasty-but-fun (so very like our very own author in so many ways), eponymous hero (of Bel Ami) Georges Duroy was told to go and "tirer les vers du nez" of a prospective interviewee (noting carefully that as long ago as the first decade of the 3rd Republic, anglicisme [indeed, américanisme] had so far corrupted the noble purity of the French language that interviewer had become the normal way of saying tenir une entrevue avec).  This opened a virtual (or veritable) can of worms, so to speak, leading ultimately to an 18th century French treatise on the various kinds of worms which in the Siècle des Lumières inhabited the human body--"nose worms" being but a fraction of them. Whew.  Or whoa.  What I doubt, from all I have looked up and read about, is that  rhinal ascariasis was so embarrassing to its victims that a long interrogation by the doctor was necessary to elicit information from them about it.  Maybe it should have been.  But from further investigation, reading that invaluable source "Straight Dope," I have learned that ascariasis (infection with round worms) afflicts an estimated 25% of mankind--as much as 90% in sanitationless 3rd-world countries.  Mostly it is transmitted by eating dirt contaminated by the feces of other human victims of ascariasis.  Probably not just the dirt, but unwashed fruits and vegetables which have somehow come in contact with such dirt.