Donkey's milk safety: POCs and PCBs levels and infant daily intake

In this work 45 donkey milk, 15 forage and 15 feed samples from farms in Sicily, Calabria and Emilia-Romagna were evaluated for the content of organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Analysis was carried out by GC-ECD and GC-MS. The limits of detection (LOD, S/N = 3) were from 0.40 to 1.91 μg L−1 and from 0.16 to 2.11 μg L−1 for the different OCPs and PCBs, respectively. The limits of quantification (LOQ, S/N = 10) were 1.32-6.37 μg L−1 and 0.52-7.53 μg L−1. The results showed few differences among samples of different farms and that contamination is kept at very low and almost always below the maximum residual levels fixed by legislation of 100 ng/g of fat for PCBs, of 0.04 mg/kg for DDTs and 0.006 mg/kg for aldrin with dieldrin (449/1999 and 149/2008). Also in comparison with current values of TDI proposed by European Agencies, the POCs and PCBs daily intakes found in donkey milk were very low for several of samples.