Introduction and objective: Natural fertilizers, sewage sludge, digestates, as well as organic fertilizers produced on their basis, can become a source of parasitological contamination of cultivated land. High concentration of invasive forms of parasites in the soil may pose a threat to human and animal health. Therefore, it is necessary to control the hygienic condition of fertilizers and fertilized soils with particular emphasis on parasites. The aim of the study was to compare the effectiveness of methods commonly used for parasitological examination of soil with own methods which were used to develop the standards.
Material and methods: The study was carried out using samples of sandy soil (SS), horticultural mix soil (HS) and peat-based substrate (PS). Each sample was spiked with 100 dyed Ascaris suum eggs and examined with the use of 6 methods: Vasilkova, Dada, Quinn, and 3 methods according to the Polish Standards (PN-19000, PN- 19005, PN-19006). For each variant, 8 repetitions were made.
Results: The largest number of A. suum eggs were found with PN-19006 (mean number of detected eggs was 21.25, 46.50, 23.00 for HS, SS, PS, respectively. Slightly lower results were obtained using PN-19005 - the mean number eggs was 21.25, 36.00, 16.75, respectively. On the other hand, the mean number of A. suum eggs found with the Dada method was about 2-3 times lower than with the PN-19006 - 15.75, 22.50, 6.50 for HS, SS, PS soil, respectively. Other methods were much less effective.
Conclusions: PN-19006 method turned out to be the most effective in detecting A. suum eggs. This method can be used for parasitological examination of soils and can be the basis for developing a system of methods dedicated to testing different types of soils for the presence of nematode eggs.
Keywords: Ascaris suum; parasite eggs; parasitological methods; soil analysis.