Trends of growth promoters and veterinary drugs in bovine urines using retrospective LC-HRMS analysis

National and international food safety authorities are increasingly adopting risk-based monitoring approaches due to EU legislation. These new monitoring approaches require retrospective analysis to follow trends, identify food safety hazards, and monitor the effectiveness of policy interventions. High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry (HRMS) is perfectly equipped for retrospective analysis because it acquires full scan data (untargeted analysis) that can be investigated for chemical hazards that have not been reported before, without re-analysing samples. Furthermore, retrospective data analysis of HRMS data files enables the investigation of trends and food safety hazards over an extended timeframe covering multiple years. In this study, we developed a retrospective approach HRMS data files for searching chemical food safety hazards in 1484 urine samples from food-producing bovines collected from 2015 to 2022. Two proofs-of-concept were conducted: 1) occurrence analysis of growth promoters and veterinary drugs in bovine urine, and 2) trend analysis over 2015 to 2022, evaluating antibiotic sales data with our retrospective analytical data. The results revealed the presence of naturally occurring hormones and the presence of three painkillers. Regarding antibiotics, 34% of the bovine urines were suspected to contain antibiotic residues, of which 16% contained two or more antibiotics. The antibiotics detected in this study largely reflected the usage data reported by the Authority of Veterinary Drugs in the Netherlands. The two concepts prove that the retrospective approach is a powerful tool for retrospective trend analysis, enabling improved food safety monitoring policies.