Detection of ethyl chloride abuse in urine sample

Abstract

Glue sniffing become popular with young adolescents and may have slipped down the list of worried for parents because it is a bigger killer for teenagers than hard drugs. Now, ethyl chloride spray was use as a sniffing alternative since it has the same characteristic with solvents and also categorized as a volatile organic compounds. Ethyl chloride normally used to prevent pain caused by minor surgical procedures and in sports used for temporary relief of minor injuries. Their high lipophilicity provides easy access to the central nervous system, where they produce global neuronal dysfunction through diverse and poorly understood means. This research was done to detect ethyl chloride presence in urine due to the wide abuse of this compound among teenager ultimately leads to addiction. In this study, the detection of ethyl chloride was analyzed using UV – Visible Spectroscopy. Thymol blue is used as an indicator to estimate the amount of ethyl chloride present. The result demonstrated that ethyl chloride can be detected in both distilled water and urine sample at 212nm with 0.9592 and 0.9966 linear regression respectively. Standard deviation for both distilled water and urine sample were 7.0090×10^-4 and 8.8690×10^-5 respectively.Limit of Detection for distilled water sample was 2.1027×10^-3 gand for urine sample was 2.6607×10^-4 g respectively. Finally the percentage of error for distilled water and urine sample were 0.19 % and 9.88 % respectively.