Introduction and objective:
Official food control laboratories ensure food safety using reliable, validated methods. Council Regulations (EC) No. 853/2004, 854/2004 and 882/2004 of the European Parliament established hygiene rules the production of food of animal origin, together with requirements for official controls. This leads to detailed requirements for Trichinella control set out in Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2015/1375 of 10 August 2015. These regulations require the laboratory to participate in proficiency testing (PT) to confirm their competence and improve the quality of testing, and require the PT Organizer to use methods for the preparation and preservation of parasite larvae in order to evaluate and improve detection. Traditional methods of preparing such larvae expose them to rapid degradation, making it necessary to simultaneously isolate the larvae and place them in meatballs to ensure quality.

Material and methods:
We developed a technique for preserving of Trichinella spp. for quality control such as PT sample preparation. The procedure protects larvae against toxic oxygen activity and bacterial destruction via a gelatin barrier. To estimate the viability of larvae preserved by this method, gelatin capsules with 10 larvae of T. spiralis in each were stored (4–8 °C) during 45 days of an experiment. Samples were tested at 2 day intervals (3 samples each day of testing).

Results:
In total, 75 samples were tested. Larvae remained alive up to 3 weeks. The number of living larvae diminished after 27 days through day 43, after which no living larvae were observed.

Conclusions:
The gelatin medium procedure facilitated easy, high-throughput sample preparation and supported 100% recovery for 3 weeks. The method allows fast, efficient and accurate PT sample preparation.