Cephalosporins type antibiotics are widely used to treat infectious diseases. Their determination is not only important in blood/serum of patients under treatment but also in diverse matrices like wastewaters, milk etc. as contaminant. Keeping in view the need, a new high performance liquid chromatographic method for the determination of three cephalosporins (cefradine, cefuroxime and cefotaxime) has been developed. Separation was performed on an ODS column with binary solvent elution of aqueous formic acid (0.05%) and methanol in the ratio of 45: 55 (v/v) at a flow rate of 1 mL min(-1) and UV detection at 260 nm. Under optimised conditions, all three cephalosporins were baseline separated within 5 min. Linear responses for cefradine 5-20 μg mL(-1), cefuroxime 0.5-15 μg mL(-1) and cefotaxime 1.0-20 μg mL(-1) were established. LOD of 0.05-0.25 μg mL(-1) after preconcentration was achieved. The method was applied to serum samples of patients under treatment with these antibiotics and to screen the selected cephalosporins from hospital wastewater and milk samples. Moreover, method was applied to study stability of aqueous solutions and acid/base induced degradation of all three drugs.
Keywords: Antibiotics; Cephalosporins; High performance liquid chromatography; Hospital wastewater; Milk; Pharmaceutically active compounds.