Determination of pesticide residues in edible snails with QuEChERS coupled to GC-MS/MS

ABSTRACT

A QuEChERS multi-residue GC-MS/MS method was developed for determining 160 pesticides in fresh edible snails. The method was validated according to the EU guidance SANTE/12682/2019. Twenty-seven different pesticides were quantified in the 824 samples analysed. Of these, 22.09% contained pesticide residues; in one case six different pesticides. The most frequently quantified pesticides were chlorpyrifos (108 samples), cypermethrin (50), difenoconazole (24), oxyfluorfen (13), lambda-cyhalothrin (12), tetraconazole and azoxystrobin (7). Other pesticides were found in <5 samples. Of the samples containing residues, 154 exceeded the EU legal limit. However, the estimated daily intake of pesticide residues showed that snail consumption does not represent appreciable risks to consumer health.

KEYWORDS:

• Pesticide residues
• edible snails
• GC-MS/MS
• daily intake

Acknowledgments

Authors would like to thank Maria Carbonell and Sol Camara providing language help and express our sincere thanks to the Pesticides Research Laboratory of CTC Spain.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Supplementary materials

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