Recently, some cases of intentional animal poisoning using Carbofuran (CF) occurred in the Czech Republic, although CF is no longer available in the EU market. The present study describes a novel non-targeted analysis (NTA) workflow developed to possibly characterize 13 CF formulations from various sources to be certainly identified in real samples. Furthermore, a detection and quantification method for CF was developed for analyzing three animal samples, obtained from dead animals. The analyses were conducted using the liquid electron ionization (LEI) interface coupled with a quadrupole time-of-flight (QTOF) mass spectrometer, allowing the simultaneous characterization of the formulation's volatile and low-volatile fractions. Almost all compounds detected in the different formulations were identified by comparing the experimental spectra with the NIST library at high probability values (95–99.38%). Determination of molecular ions, followed by MS/MS analysis, was performed to confirm compound identities at a high level of confidence. The quantification method for CF was successfully validated, showing negligible matrix effects (107%). CF was detected in two out of the three real samples. Only 3-keto-carbofuran was detected in one of the real samples; without any other marker, it was not possible to identify the specific formulation used in the three poisoning cases.
Grasselli et al. (2026) studied this question.