Wide-scope pesticide residues and contaminants in cereal-based infant formulas

MICHLIG, MELINA; MICHLIG, NICOLÁS; REPETTI, MARÍA ROSA; DEMONTE, LUISINA; BELDOMÉNICO, HORACIO; DZUMAN, ZBYNEK; MAGNI, FLORENCIA; HAJSLOVA, JANA

Congreso; 14th International IUPAC Congress on Crop Protection; 2019

The presence of pesticide residues and other toxins in food can negatively affect human health. Special attention is paid to the safety of children and infants, as they represent a vulnerable risk group within the population. The wide variety of cereal-based infant food matrices and their complexity, as well as the high number of compounds that should be monitored, requires the application of reliable, high-throughput and efficient analytical methods. In Argentina, despite the great economic and nutritional importance of cereals destined to infant foods and final products from the baby food chain, there have been no rigorous controls, even no sound specific research studies to achieve a deep characterization of the problem. Recently it has been verified in a wide scope survey the frequent occurrence of many pesticides and toxins in agricultural crops and animal feed products concluding on the necessity of enhancement on the scientific and authority concern on this issue. There are studies related to the determination of several classes of pesticides in baby food, but in this work we focused on the application of a multiresidue-multiclass method where pesticides, mycotoxins and pyrrolizidine alkaloids were analysed simultaneously by high performance liquid chromatography separation and high resolution tandem mass spectrometric determination (HRMS/MS). The presented study was focused on the determination of multi-class contaminants in different kind of commercial cereal-based baby and infant food. Several commercial samples containing mainly oat, rice, wheat and maize and one organic rice (not commercial) were analyzed. For the analysis optimized and validated QuEChERS-based extraction procedure was employed. Crude extracts from 2 g of sample were analyzed employing HPLC coupled with Q-orbitrap mass analyzer. MS/MS spectral library with 323 pesticides, 55 mycotoxins and 11 pyrrolizidine alkaloids was used to non-target screening. The HRMS/MS approach allowed the non-target screening, retrospective data mining as well as quantitation and confirmation of theoretically unlimited number of analytes within a single analytical run. The availability of multiple confirmatory steps (accurate mass, isotopic profile and MS/MS fragmentation spectra) significantly improved the confidence in the results. The results on pesticides focused, showed that the samples contained between one and six pesticides simultaneously with concentrations in the range of LOQ-80 μg kg-1. The pesticides most frequently detected were chlorpyrifos and pirimiphos-methyl. Both insecticides are widely employed in Argentina. Frequent mycotoxins occurrence was found most of them with quantified values. Zearalenone was significantly found (50% of samples) in all analyzed cereal types: wheat, maize, rice and oats. Emerging toxins such as argot alkaloids and ennantins were quantified in oats samples and in mixed oats-rice samples. And 4 maize-based samples were also contaminated with fumonisins. While, no pesticides and mycotoxins were detected in organic rice. This kind of wide-scope study was not previously reported in processed infant food cereals from Argentina. Findings were relevant since multi-contamination in individual samples was frequent and in some cases with considerable levels, showing that more research in this area is needed and improvements on monitoring systems and management practices at farm level are highly recommended to protect baby and infant health.