ASSESSMENT OF BACTERIOLOGICAL QUALITY OF WELL WATER AROUND DOGON DAWA DISTRICT IN BIRNIN GWARI LOCAL GOVERNMENT, KADUNA STATE

Abstract

The inadequate supply of clean drinkable water and the frequent pollution of existing supplies have created very serious health problems for people living in developing countries like Nigeria. Water serves as a vehicle for the transmission of diseases like typhoid fever, botulism, diarrhea, dysentery, Schistosomiasis, ascariasis, acute severe syndrome etc. which have contributed immensely to the stagnation of the economic development of some of these nations. The assessment of bacteriological quality of well water was conducted to ascertain the quality of water consumed in the District. Water obtained from wells, streams and boreholes are not always chemically pure, even rain water contains dissolved materials from the air as well as suspended dust mixed with microorganisms.  Twenty samples were collected from twenty different wells in four different areas that made up Dogon Dawa district. 100ml sterile bottles were used in collecting the water samples and capped carefully after transferring the water into the bottles, each bottle was assigned a code for easy identification, put into ice box and transported to Kaduna State Water Board Central Laboratory for analysis The Multiple tube fermentation technique was used to determine total coliform count and Eosin methylene blue was used to determine fecal coliform count. Some physicochemical parameters of the water samples such as turbidity, temperature, pH and dissolved oxygen (DO) were also determined. In all the 20 well water samples collected in Dogon Dawa district, there were very high bacterial count of between 26.20 -19.00 x10² cfu/ml which exceeded the recommended level of zero coliform/ml. The physicochemical parameters correlated with the bacterial contamination of samples. The turbidity of all samples of well water of between 8.0 - 9.0 NTU also exceeded the recommended level of 1.0-5.0 NTU. This study has shown that there is a high level of bacterial contamination of well water by pathogenic organisms in Dogon Dawa district. To reduce the high incidence of well water contamination, it is advocated that wells dug must be deep, far away from latrines and covered adequately.