Development and application of a LC-HRMS method for simultaneous determination of ten illicit antifungal drugs in herbal bacteriostatic products.

The widespread use of sub-therapeutic antibiotics may lead to treatment failures, increased resistance to antibiotics, and even the encouragement of the formation of superbugs. Fraudulent herbal medicines that actually contain unlabeled active ingredients are a global problem. Therefore, streamlined and accurate analytical techniques that can identify and quantify a variety of antimicrobials in suspected illegal products are required. In the present work, we developed a sensitive, robust, and accurate method that involves multi-step extraction, EMR-lipid-based pass-through cleanup, and UHPLC-Q/HRMS with an orbital ion trap instrument analysis for the simultaneous detection of ten illicit antifungal drugs (flucytosine, fluconazole, ketoconazole, naftifine hydrochloride, griseofulvin, bifonazole, econazole nitrate, elubiol, clotrimazole, and miconazole nitrate) in herbal disinfection products. This validated method was then applied to 210 authentic samples, resulting in 25% of the samples being positive for the drugs. The results suggested the need to strengthen controls in this field to detect illicit antifungal drugs in herbal bacteriostatic products, which represents a potential health risk for the consumer. On a global scale, more and more frequent routine monitoring is being carried out in this area. This study provides valuable insights into large-scale complex sample chemical profiling, and the method developed appears to be promising and applicable for high-throughput routine multiple antibiotic analysis in a complex sample matrix.