• The Korean Journal of Pesticide Science
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.140-148
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• 2011

The official analytical method of residue pesticides in herbal medicines by KFDA cannot be applied to all of the pesticides and herbal medicines because of various active materials in herbal medicines and various physicochemical properties of pesticides. Moreover, liquid-liquid partition uses harmful solvents such as methylene chloride and is consuming a lot of time and effort. In order to improve the problems, we have studied for the availability of the analytical method applying the macroporous diatomaceous earth (MDE) column instead of liquid-liquid partition to simultaneously analyze five pesticides in two dried herbal medicines. The results showed that the recovery rates of acetamiprid and azoxystrobin in Astragalus root by GC/ECD ranged from 89.6 to 94.1%, from 86.8 to 94.4%, respectively, and those of bifenthrin, chlorfenapyr, chlorpyrifos in Cnidii Rhizoma by GC/MS ranged from 83.6 to 88.4%, from 77.4 to 83.8%, from 82.6 to 84.3%, respectively. Also, the coefficients of variation (CV) for triplication ranged from 0.5 to 1.7%. The results satisfied the criteria of residue pesticide analysis, setting 70~120% for the recovery rate and below 10% for the coefficient of variation. The improved methods are safer to residue pesticide analysts, faster and less laborious than the KFDA official method.