A cheap and simple method for determining of Antibiotics in pharmaceutical products by using Prussian Blue reaction

Abstract

Tetracycline and Vancomycin in pharmaceutical dosage forms has been developed and validated. The method is based on the formation of Prussian Blue (PB) complex. The reaction between the acidic hydrolysis product of the antibiotics (T = 65oC) with the mixture of Fe3+ and hexacyanoferate (III) ions was evaluated for the spectrophotometric determination of the antibiotics. The maximum absorbance of the colored complex occurred at λ= 700 nm and the molar absorptivity is 3.2 × 104 L.mol-1 cm-1. Reaction conditions have been optimized to obtain PB complex of high sensitivity and longer stability. Under optimum conditions the absorbance of the PB complex were found to increase linearly with increase in concentrations of Tetracycline and Vancomycin, which corroborated with the correlation coefficient values. The linear range of the calibration graph was1.5-25 ppm and 1.8- 24ppm for Tetracycline and Vancomycin respectively. The proposed method was successfully applied to the determination of the selected antibiotics in bulk drugs and pharmaceutical formulations and the results obtained agree well with the labeled contents. Antibiotics are widely used in human and veterinary medicine for the prevention and treatment of bacterial infectious diseases. An important but often disregarded aspect of antibiotic use is the fate of antibiotic residues entering the environment. Pharmaceutical industry wastewater improperly-disposed of unused antibiotics and non-metabolized antibiotics excreted by humans can all enter the sewer system in low concentrations. The validity of the method was tested by the official methods and by the recovery studies of standard addition to pharmaceuticals