In 2017, a commercially available
dog food was found by our laboratory
to be adulterated with the euthanasia drug pentobarbital. An FDA class
1 voluntary recall by the company ensued. Since there is no set tolerance
for pentobarbital in food or feed, a sensitive method for its detection
was required. We describe a simple, yet efficient, method for the
extraction and quantitative analysis of the barbiturate in dog food.
The procedure relies on a combined food emergency response network
(FERN) and QuEChERS (quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, and safe)
approach to sample extraction followed by quantitative analysis by
gas chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (GC/MS/MS) using
pentobarbital-d
5 as an internal standard.
This procedure improves upon other GC/MS methodologies in that derivatization
of pentobarbital or its deuterated internal standard is unnecessary,
and sensitivity to a calculated limit of detection (LOD) of 0.6 ppb
and a limit of quantitation (LOQ) of 2 ppb is achieved.