Abstract
Safe drinking water is an essential ingredient for good health of both human beings and animals. In developing countries, microbial contaminations of drinking water is a major public health issue and are responsible for causing diarrhea, giardiasis, cholera, salmonellosis, dysentery and gastroenteritis. According to WHO, approximately 1.1 billon people drink unsafe water globally and around 88% of diarrhoeal diseases reported are caused due to drinking of unsafe water. The objective of this study was to determine the bacteriological quality of different sources of water in Orathanadu, Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu. A total of 42 water samples were collected randomly from different sources including borewell, pond and supplied municipal water in different regions of Orathanadu, Tamil Nadu and the samples were analyzed for total viable bacterial count and total thermotolerant coliform count. Results suggest that pond water sources were contaminated with thermotolerant coliforms suggesting poor protection and sanitary practices prevailing in the area. This problem can be rectified by constructing feces around water sources, regular maintenance and supervision followed by proper disposal of human and animal wastes are recommended. Keywords: Drinking water, microbial quality, Thermotolerant coliforms, Total viable bacterial count
Highlights
Water is the most important nutrient needed for all metabolic processes essential for life, growth, production and reproduction in humans and animals
The collected water samples were analyzed for total viable bacterial count by pour plate technique and total thermotolerant coliform count by plating on nutrient agar and Macconkey agar respectively
The results suggest that only pond water Total Viable Bacterial Count (TVBC) level is more than 500 CFU/mL
Summary
Water is the most important nutrient needed for all metabolic processes essential for life, growth, production and reproduction in humans and animals. Contaminated water may contain microbial contaminants such as coliforms, E. coli, Salmonella, Vibrio cholerae, Yersinia enterolocolitica, Shigella species, Campylobacter species, viruses such as Hepatitis A, Hepatitis E, Rota virus and parasites such as Cryptosporidium parvum and Giardia lamblia (Opara and Nnodim, 2014; Adetunde and Glover, 2010). Presence of coliforms such as Escherichia coli, Klebsiella, and Enterobacter species in water is a possible indicator of the presence of pathogenic organisms (Anyamene and Ojiagu, 2014). Children are most susceptible group of waterborne diarrhoeal diseases and act as most likely source of infection to others (WHO, 2000)
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