Tracking Down Fraud

Detecting formalin in baby lotion, determining a patent breach for a medicinal product, tracking illicit drugs in sportsmen, or discovering a pesticide in an organically-labeled product: All these activities depend on the increasingly sophisticated know-how and techniques of chemical analysis. They are developed and currently used by CNRS' Central Analysis Service (SCA)¹ in Lyon, headed by Jean-Jacques Lebrun.
“Chemical analysis is one of the tools used to expose fraud,” explains Lebrun. French courts, legal authorities, police, and various ministries regularly ask the SCA to test certain products. “Most requests concern the areas of agrifood, pharmaceutical or cosmetic products, and doping substances,” adds Lebrun. Although spectacular, this is only one aspect of the workload of the SCA, which also carries out analyses for CNRS, universities, and the private sector, and dedicates a quarter of its time to research and training.

Check the Label
The most important area, where demand for analysis is seeing the most growth, is the agrifood industry. Whether asked to detect the addition of water in a “100% fruit juice,” sugar in a “sugar-free” product, or synthetic molecules in “100% natural” royal jelly, SCA analysts use ultra-sophisticated methods to find substances that may sometimes only be present as traces. “Modern measuring instruments can detect a substance at a concentration of one part per billion, i.e., one nanogram per gram of matter. Our methods allow us to increase the sensitivity by a thousand,” explains Lebrun. However, it requires that the target substance be concentrated up to a thousand times in the sample, without accumulating agents that could mask it along the way.
To understand how this works, imagine evaporating 1000 liters of water, and placing the dry residue in 1 liter of pure water; it is now concentrated a thousand times. One drawback is that some of the substances you are seeking may have evaporated with the water. “The performance of measurement instruments has not improved in recent years, so it is selective enrichment that will enable the greatest progress.” A method often made more difficult by the complexity of the search, as, for example, when testing in a single procedure for the presence or absence of 90 different pesticides in a sample of honey.

Tough Constraints
When working on traces, sample preparation is crucial, and the utmost precautions are needed to avoid contamination. “When we tested honey for the presence of an insecticide called Fipronil, we realized that our results were compromised because a lab member was using Fipronil to treat his dog against ticks,” explains Lebrun. Any search for substances that can only be present as trace amounts require extra precautions, to avoid making any mistakes. Like when trying to detect traces of by-products in a medicinal product, the presence of which would be indicative of the fraudulent application of a patent-protected manufacturing process. Or when searching for traces of Tamoxifen, a breast cancer treatment that is also used by some sportsmen to mask the use of anabolic steroids.
“We also need to brace ourselves for a new type of fraud that is becoming increasingly prevalent in France,” warns Lebrun. Taking advantage of the current trend for natural products, companies are selling them over the internet to avoid any controls. “You can buy anything on internet, including extracts of plants from the Amazon basin that do not contain the slightest trace of plant extracts.” But chemists can only go so far, and it is up to consumers to be wary, and aware that it is impossible to control everything traded on the World Wide Web.

Denis Delbecq