Quality assessment of brands of erythromycin stearate tablets marketed in Abuja, Nigeria

Erythromycin is one of the most frequently prescribed antibiotics. With the increasing number of pharmaceutical industries, the possibility of  purchasing a substandard product is on the high side. This makes it necessary to subject various commercially produced brands of erythromycin to quality evaluation in order to ascertain the quality. In this quality assessment study, six (6) brands of erythromycin tablets were subjected to physicochemical assay using standard physical methods and UV/VIS spectrophotometric analysis at 480 nm. The calibration curve for reference erythromycin was linear over a concentration range of 10-100 μg/ml with a correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.999. All the brands had standard deviation of weight greater than ±5 for the weight uniformity test. 66.67% of the brands passed the test for content of active ingredient. 83.33% of the brands examined passed the hardness test. All the brands failed the friability test because the percentage weight loss are greater than 1% as specified in the official book. Keywords: Erythromycin stearate; Tablets; Brands; Pharmaceutical Industries