Simultaneous Determination of Five Coccidiostats in Veterinary Powders, Feed Premixes, and Baby Food by Micellar Electrokinetic Chromatography: Application to Chicken Tissues and Liver Fathalla Belal 1 & Sawsan Abd El-Razeq 2 & Manal Fouad 3 & Sahar Zayed 4 & Fatma Fouad 2 Received: 2 May 2018 /Accepted: 11 July 2018 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract A new, simple, and reliable micellar electrokinetic chromatographic method was developed and validated for the simultaneous determination of amprolium, ethopabate, diaveridine, sulphadimidine, and sulphaquinoxaline. The separation was achieved using 50 mM tris buffer (pH 8.5) with 50 mM SDS and 15% acetonitrile (v/v) at 28 kV and the components were detected at 200 nm. Different factors affecting the electrophoretic mobility of the five investigated drugs were studied and optimized. Method validation showed that calibration plots were linear within the range from 0.5 to 100 μg/mL with a correlation coefficient > 0.998. Intraday and interday precision and accuracy evaluated by relative standard deviation were lower than 2%. The limits of detection were in the ranges of 0.02 to 0.07 μg/mL. The new method with simple sample pretreatment based on aqueous methanol extraction has been successfully applied for analysis of these drugs in powder preparations, feed premixes, baby food, chicken tissues, and liver samples with the recoveries of 97–101%. The present method is suitable and favorable for the analysis of the five coccidiostats drugs on account of its cost effectiveness, simplicity, rapidity, and sensitivity. Keywords Micellar electrokinetic chromatography . Anticoccidial drugs . Powder preparations . Feed premixes . Baby food . Chicken tissues . Liver Introduction Coccidiostats are widely used in poultry farming as feed addi- tives for the prevention and treatment of coccidiosis. This para- sitic disease of the intestinal tract is caused by protozoa of the genera Eimeria and Isospora, causing bleeding and swelling of the intestines (Broekaert et al. 2011). This causes weight loss or poor weight gain and, thus, serious economical consequences in animal production. Among anticoccidial mainly used as feed additives for poultry are sulfonamides, diaveridine, amprolium, and ethopabate which are registered as veterinary drugs for the treatment of the clinical form of coccidiosis. Sulphadimidine (SDM) and sulphaquioxaline (SQL) are the most frequently used sulfonamides for both prevention and treatment of diseases and as feed additives to promote growth in animal feeding oper- ations (Clarke et al. 2014). In the 1950s, amprolium (AMP) was developed, a coccidiostat still used today. It used to inhibit the growth of protozoan coccidian in chicken feed and for the treat- ment of the clinical form of coccidiosis (Song et al. 2007). Ethopabate (EPB) is usually used in combination with AMP. It has anticoccidial activity especially against intestinal forms (Clarke et al. 2014). Diaveridine (DVR) has remarkable activity against coccidia and used to treat intestinal infections. DVR is rarely used by itself in the clinic; it is used as a synergist with SDM (Wanga et al. 2014). The chemical structures of the studied drugs are shown in Fig. 1. The continuous administration of coccidiostats often leads to the accumulation of veterinary drug residues in food products for human consumption, which may cause adverse toxic effects on consumers’ health (Girardi and Odore 2008). Therefore, the con- trol of veterinary drug residue is an important measure in ensur- ing consumer protection (Commission Recommendation 2005/ * Sahar Zayed s1zayed@yahoo.com 1 Department of Pharmaceutical Analytical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Mansoura, Mansoura, Egypt 2 Department of Analytical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt 3 Department of Analytical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Al-Azhar University, October University for Modern Sciences and Arts, Cairo, Egypt 4 Unit of Drug Analysis, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Mansoura, Mansoura, Egypt Food Analytical Methods https://doi.org/10.1007/s12161-018-1330-y