Analysis of erythromycin and oleandomycin residues in food by high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorometric detection

A reliable and sensitive procedure is presented for the analysis of erythromycin (ERY) and oleandomycin (OLE) in food of animal origin, such as meat, liver, kidney, raw milk and egg. The method is based on a solid-phase extraction clean-up with a cation exchange cartridge, a 9-fluoromethylchloroformate (FMOC) precolumn derivatization and a separation by HPLC with fluorometric detection. The selectivity is satisfactory enough to control ERY and OLE residues as not many interfering peaks are observed for various food matrices. The macrolides recoveries of the total procedure were low, although >50%. However, addition of an internal standard (roxithromycin) corrected for recovery to give satisfactory quantitative results for repeatability, linearity, detection and quantification limits and mainly accuracy.