Feed Ingredients Mainly Contributing to Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon and Polychlorinated Biphenyl Residues

Animal nutrition constitutes an important issue for the animal production industry. Products intended for animal feed may contain undesirable substances which could endanger animal health or, because of their presence in livestock products, human health or the environment. In this sense, several incidents related with the presence of persistent organic pollutants, particularly with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), have happen in food and feed additives. Simple, fast, quantitative, and economic methods for determining PAHs and PCBs in potentially polluting feed ingredients were developed and evaluated. The methods involved liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), clean-up, and detection by liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection (LC-FD) for PAHs and gas chromatography (GC) coupled to electron capture detection (ECD) for PCBs, using tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) as confirmatory technique. The overall method quantification limits range from 0.020– 4.0 μg/Kg for PAHs and from 0.20–0.75 μg/Kg for PCBs, analyte recoveries are between 70 and 105% with relative standard deviations (RSD) lower than 20%. Once the method was optimized, it was applied to 25 feed ingredients considered as potential candidates for feedstuff. As expected, the samples of animal origin as shell powder and fish oil showed the highest PCB concentrations of 56 and 29 ng/g, which are equivalent to toxicological concentrations of 123 and 18 ng WHO-TEQDL-PCBs/Kg, respectively. Opposite results were obtained with PAHs and the highest PAH4 levels were detected alfalfa (47 μg/Kg), calcium phosphate (27 μg/Kg), and palm oil (23 μg/Kg) used as feed ingredients.