Laboratory of Human Parasitology conducts particularly applied research that contributes to the diagnosis, epidemiology and control of human parasitic diseases and parasitic zoonoses. The pathogens studied include parasitic helminths (Echinococcus spp., Toxocara spp., Trichinella spp., Dirofilaria spp., Taenia spp., Hymenolepis spp.) and protozoa (Toxoplasma gondii).
The laboratory's work involves the improvement of serological and molecular methods for highly sensitive and specific diagnostics of parasitic zoonoses and defining their prevalence and parasitic burden in endemic and non-endemic populations. As the only laboratory in the Slovak Republic, the Laboratory provides the possibility of molecular diagnostics of human echinococcosis and taeniosis for clinicians, hospitals and diagnostic laboratories. Moreover, phylogeographical relationships to elucidate dispersion patterns and movements of haplotypes of studied parasites with respect to evolutionary events are inferred by generating parsimony networks.