Determination of Antibiotic Residues in Manure, Soil, and Surface Waters

Abstract

In the last years more and more often detections of antimicrobially active compounds (“antibiotics”) in surface waters have been reported. As a possible input pathway in most cases municipal sewage has been discussed. But as an input from the realm of agriculture is conceivable as well, in this study it should be investigated if an input can occur via the pathway application of liquid manure on fields with the subsequent mechanisms surface run‐off/interflow, leaching, and drift. For this purpose a series of surface waters, soils, and liquid manures from North Rhine‐Westphalia (Northwestern Germany) were sampled and analyzed for up to 29 compounds by HPLC‐MS/MS.In each of the surface waters antibiotics could be detected. The highest concentrations were found in samples from spring (300 ng/L of erythromycin). Some of the substances detected (e.g., tylosin), as well as characteristics in the landscape suggest an input from agriculture in some particular cases. In the investigation of different liquid manure samples by a fast immunoassay method sulfadimidine could be detected in the range of 1…2 mg/kg. Soil that had been fertilized with this liquid manure showed a content of sulfadimidine extractable by accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) of 15 μg/kg dry weight even 7 months after the application. This indicates the high stability of some antibiotics in manure and soil.

An overview of analytical methodologies for the determination of antibiotics in environmental waters

“…However, other types of sorbents were utilized as well as can be seen in Table 1. In three studies the tandem of two SPE cartridges was used to achieve better clean-up step and thus high recoveries [19,42,43]. Washing step was referred in majority of studies as is suitable for extraction of analytes from the complex matrices as wastewaters.…”

“…Two kinds of cartridges were used for the extraction of many compounds from class of MLs, FQs, TCs, and SAs [42,43]. The first mentioned study used Oasis HLB cartridge on the top of SDB cartridge, the second study used the tandem Oasis HLB and MCX cartridges.…”

Excretion masses and environmental occurrence of antibiotics in typical swine and dairy cattle farms in China

“…Antibiotics associated with livestock manure and wastewater application onto land can also enter surface water via run off, or leach into groundwater (Davis et al, 2006;Dolliver and Gupta, 2008). So far, antibiotic residues have been reported in the surrounding environments of animal farms, with the concentrations from not detected to 2683 μg/kg in soil (Hu et al, 2010;Li et al, 2011), from 2 ng/L to 6800 ng/L in surface water (Christian et al, 2003;Matsui et al, 2008), and from 1.4 to 1400 ng/L in groundwater (Batt et al, 2006;Campagnolo et al, 2002).…”

Use patterns, excretion masses and contamination profiles of antibiotics in a typical swine farm, south China

“…8 Antibiotics have oen been found in animal manures at concentrations of up to tens of mg kg À1 , [9][10][11][12][13] in animal wastewater at concentrations up to tens of mg L À1 , [14][15][16] and in the environmental components affected by animal waste, including surface water, groundwater and agricultural land at several hundreds of ng L À1 . 11,[17][18][19] Antibiotic residues in the environment can affect aquatic and terrestrial organisms, [20][21][22][23] and lead to the development of antibiotic resistance by exerting selective pressure on the microbial community. 24,25 Therefore, the extensive use of antibiotics in the livestock industry has become an increasing concern due to the potential risks posed by their residues to the environment and human health.…”