Bacterial pathogens associated with hand-dug wells in Ibadan city, Nigeria

The supply of pipe borne water in Nigeria has over the years become grossly inadequate or totally non-existent. This has led many people to seek alternative sources of water from streams, springs and especially hand-dug wells. This study was carried out to investigate the bacteriological quality of water from hand–dug wells in Ibadan city. This was done by investigating bacterial indicator of water quality in samples collected from 50 hand-dug wells and three bore holes from five different local government areas within Ibadan Municipal city and examined for total coliform and faecal coliform. Water samples from 96% of the wells were found to be contaminated with both total coliform and faecal coliform. The total coliform counts and fecal coliform counts ranged between 0 to 160x103/100 ml and 0 to 22x103/100 ml, respectively. The predominant bacterial isolates include Escherichia coli (38.5%), Klebsiella spp. (16.9%), Staphylococcus aureus (13.8%) and Enterobacter spp. (9.2%). While antibiotic susceptibility to nitrofurantoin (96.9%), gentamycin (93.6%) and streptomycin (93.3%) was high, it was low in ampicillin (37.8%) and to a lesser extent in Cotrimoxazole(66.7%). 24.1% of the isolates were multidrug resistant with about seven patterns observed. Hand-dug wells in the area of study were highly contaminated with pathogenic bacteria and this exposes consumers of water drawn from these wells to the risk of contracting various waterborne diseases.