Agricultural and Veterinary Pesticides Residues in Human Food

Abstract

Expanding utilization of pesticides can provoke serious issues due to their biomagnification and persistent nature. Eventual contamination of fresh daily-consumed food by pesticide constitutes a human food security problem. The present investigation planned to check out whether the most hazardous pesticides could be found in a varied collection of wheat, vegetables and fruit, on the other hand, we attempted to know if some banned and no more commercialized pesticides could be even detected. Effectively, we have chosen to analyze wheat, potato, tomato, apple, peach and grape, so, after the extraction procedure of pesticides, we used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to identify some hazardous compounds (organochlorines and organophosphorus). These compounds were used as standards to generate calibration curves and estimate precisely their concentration in the tested samples using selected ion monitoring (SIM) mode. The results have shown the presence of an important quantity of pesticides that are no more used (banned) for decades for agriculture purposes but they are still used as veterinary drugs, such as lindane (0.2 ppm grape, 0.32 ppm tomato) and fenchlorphos (0.5 ppm grape). This survey should be routinely executed by scientists and concerned authorities to control pesticides circulation with their exact amounts in food and other environmental matrices as well as eventual contamination with another toxic element.