Bacteriological Analysis of Well Water Sources in the Bambui Student Residential Area.docVIP

Journal of Water Resource and Protection, 2013, 5, 1013-1017 Published Online November 2013 (/journal/jwarp) /10.4236/jwarp.2013.511106 Bacteriological Analysis of Well Water Sources in the Bambui Student Residential Area Niba Rawlings Ngwa , Nchang Chrysanthus * Department of Medical and Biomedical Science, National Polytechnic Bambui, Bamenda, Cameroon Email: * rawlingston@, nbngwa@ Received May 13, 2013; revised June 16, 2013; accepted July 12, 2013 Copyright ? 2013 Niba Rawlings Ngwa, Nchang Chrysanthus. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Com- mons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT Majority of the population in the Bambui student residential area depend on wells as their source of water supply. Due to increasing complaints from students after using this well water sources, this study was carried out to examine the microbial quality of well water sources in the Bambui student residential area, Bamenda, Cameroon as a way of safe guarding public health against water borne diseases. Water samples from a total of fifteen wells, covered and uncovered were assessed for their bacteriological quality using the multiple tube fermentation technique to determine the coliform count using the most probable number method. Positive tubes of the presumptive test were further cultured on appropri- ate solid media. The organisms isolated were further characterized using standard procedures. The result of the study revealed that most of the wells were grossly contaminated with bacteria pathogens such as Klebsiella species (95%), Escherichia coli (52%) and Salmonella typhi (32.5%). Comparatively, the uncovered wells were more contaminated with bacteria pathogens than the covered well. All the water samples except three exceeded the standard limit of the most probable number (MP