A Study on the Microbial Quality of Drinking Water in Rural Areas of Mazandaran Province in North of Iran (2011)

One of the fundamental needs of a community is to have an access to healthy and safe drinking water. The lack of a concentrated accessibility to health facilities and services is among the serious problems facing villagers in the rural areas. The aims of this research was to investigate the drinking water quality of the villages in Babol town-ship suburbs in north of Iran. In this cross-sectional descriptive study, a total of 140 water samples were taken from the water distribution network in 16 villages for the low and high-rain seasons in sterile glass bottle. Based on obtained results 13.6% of the samples were contaminated to coliform and 20% to fecal coliform bacteria. The residual chlorine in 12.5% of the samples were between 0.2 to 0.8 mg-L-1 and the PH in total samples were between 6.8 to 7.8. There were no signs of any contamination for 32.86% of the analysed samples which water resources is located to a distance of more than 30 m to the contamination sources.