Assessment of heavy metals, fungicide quintozene and its hazardous impurity residues in medical Panax notoginseng (Burk) F.H.Chen root

Abstract A quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, and safe extraction approach and gas chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry with programmed temperature vaporization sampling technology were used to determine fungicide quintozene and its hazardous impurity hexachlorobenzene (HCB) in Panax notoginseng root, which is commonly used as a rare traditional Chinese medicine worldwide. The mean recoveries were in the ranges of 94–125 and 84–119% for quintozene and HCB with relative standard deviations of 6.2–16.1% at three concentrations: 0.01, 0.1 and 1 mg kg −1 . Heavy metals arsenic, cadmium, copper and lead were simultaneously detected by an inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry approach after digestion with nitric acid. The above methods were used to analyze 50 samples of P. notoginseng roots collected at markets and planting bases from the special local producing areas, namely, Honghe, Kunming and Wenshan in Yunnan province, China. Quintozene and HCB in root samples were determined at <0.0015–1.50 and <0.0015–0.125 mg kg −1 . In the 50 samples, 28, 16, 56, 6 and 2% exceeded the maximum permissible levels in medicinal plants (WM/T2‐2004) for quintozene, arsenic, cadmium, lead and copper. [Correction added on 28 January 2019, after first online publication: the percentages in the preceding sentence have been corrected]. The results showed that the method is robust and suitable for measuring quintozene, its hazardous impurity and heavy metals in P. notoginseng roots.