The consumption of pharmaceuticals and personal care products is a day to day occurrence. Once consumed the body excretes the remaining part of the compound which is not absorbed. This waste, flushed down the toilet, makes its way through the sewage system before arriving at a treatment facility where it was then processed with chemicals to ensure its cleanliness. Despite being washed, there can remain trace amounts of bacteria, hormones, metals, and antibiotics in whatever you consume, not just water.Get the Tech Note Here >

Here, I want to focus on antibiotics, not just their overuse as I have detailed in an earlier blog Quantitation of Antibiotics and Insecticides in Poultry Feed using LC-MS/MS, but their presence in the human body, specifically children. As mentioned, antibiotics can reach our water supply via elimination. However, they are also present in meat, eggs, milk, other food, and water pollution which can pose problems for developing bodies. For sure, there has been much attention paid to rampant over-prescribing and the resulting ineffectiveness in treating common infections. But what do we know about measuring its presence in children who are not currently taking a course of treatment?

First, let me share with you the following application note, Rapid and Sensitive Analysis of Antibiotics in Children’s Urine Using the X500R QTOF System, which discusses how antibiotics, a class of secondary metabolites produced by microorganisms, can be measured in biological samples using the X500R QTOF system. In their analysis, researchers diligently screened for more than 200 varieties of antibiotics in eight categories and concluded the benefits of using single-injection alongside SCIEX OS software. According to the experimental results, eight compounds in four categories were detected in 104 samples.

The Take Away:
The possible overuse of antibiotics/veterinary drugs in food production could be catastrophic as the drugs may become ineffective and then the bacteria may become immune and untreatable. Therefore, stricter monitoring of antibiotics in food levels is required. Perhaps your lab is already involved in the monitoring of antibiotics in biological samples, and my hope is that you can further your studies using methods like this one. The benefit is that you get to use a routine mass spec system anyone in the lab can operate, using single injection technology and more.