Investigating drug residues in Mongolian milk using a newly developed method with high performance liquid chromatography and a photo diode array

Despite the beneficial impacts of using drugs in animal husbandry, the risks of drug residues in animal products are a concern worldwide. Therefore, most countries have developed systems and methods to detect and monitor drug residues in animal products using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with mass spectrometry (MS). However, MS detectors are not available in all universities; thus, we developed a new method suitable for ultraviolet detection. We first validated a new method targeting tetracycline and albendazole in milk and evaluated these drug residues in 50 samples collected from farms and supermarkets in Mongolia. The practical limit of quantification (PQL) calculated in our newly developed method was suitable to detect the maximum residual limits defined in Codex Alimentarius, and the accuracy and precision of a new method were comparable to previous studies. In particular, inter-day analysis showed great precision, with albendazole showing a 99% recovery rate with ± 3.3 of relative standard deviation (RSD). In addition, we evaluated our drugs contamination, but targeted drugs residues were not detected in the current sample set. However, this may reflect the decreased use of tetracycline in the veterinary field and seasonal use of albendazole in Mongolia. Therefore, these drugs must be continuously monitored. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report about drug residues in milk published in an international journal by a Mongolian domestic institution. Further investigations of drug residue in Mongolia are urgently needed.