The widespread use of pharmaceuticals including hormones, antibiotics, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, antidepressants, and antifungal agents results in significant discharge of these drugs and their metabolites into wastewater.
Concerns have been raised over their potential to contaminate ground and surface waters, and to enter drinking water supplies. Therefore, monitoring pharmaceuticals in aqueous samples represents an important analytical task.
Using capillary LC for this purpose provides many advantages including dramatically reduced consumption of toxic and expensive organic solvents and potentially higher sensitivity when using MS detection resulting from intrinsically low mobile phase flow rates.
In this study, it is highlighted that the identification and quantification of drugs in mixtures of components in model aqueous samples, based on capillary HPLC coupled to tandem mass spectroscopy, has been successfully performed.