Abstract

Five wells in Eku were assessed for total heterotrophic bacterial and coliform counts from January to December. Sixty isolates of Escherichia coli were also obtained from the well water samples throughout the study period. It was observed that, values of total heterotrophic bacterial and coliform load obtained varied with seasons although the total heterotrophic bacterial counts were significantly higher than the coliform load at all times. During the dry season, values of the total heterotrophic bacterial count ranged from 2.08 to 5.48 (log cfu/mL) while coliform counts ranged from 2.3 to 3.26 (log cfu/mL). On the other hand, total heterotrophic bacterial and coliform counts ranged from 3.34 to 7.14 (log cfu/mL) and 3.15 to 3.98 (log cfu/mL) respectively during the rainy season. Results obtained revealed that 76.6% of total Escherichia coli isolates evaluated, demonstrated multiple antibiotics resistance while 18.3% showed single antibiotics resistance. On curing, 83.3% of test Escherichia coli population lost their antibiotics resistant gene indicating that these genes resided on plasmid.

Keywords:

Antibiotics resistance, Escherichia coli, plasmid, well water,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.