SEPARATION OF CHLORHEXIDINE BREAKDOWN PRODUCTS INCLUDING 4-CHLOROANILINE IN SURGICAL SCRUBS CONTAINING CHLORHEXIDINE

Chlorhexidine is an effective antimicrobial agent used in surgical hand scrubs and patient pre-operative preps for skin disinfection. As these solutions age, chlorhexidine degrades to produce breakdown products including 4-chloroani1ine. The determination of 4-chloroani1ine is usually carried out by a cleanup protocol using chlorinated solvents for sample preparation and by gas chromatography for analysis. This procedure is tedious and requires special precautions. Current HPLC methods(3,4) are unable to analyze the chlorhexidine breakdown products in surgical scrub solutions which contain surfactants, gelling agents, etc., that give rise to complications in the resolution of peaks. The method reported here overcomes these problems while preserving the overall simplicity of the current HPLC methods. The 4-chloro-aniline peak is clearly resolved from the peaks of the other breakdown products. © 1990, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.