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ABSTRACT
The research was carried out to evaluate the quantitative microbial risk of antibiotics resistant Escherichia coli and Salmonella species in fish pond water. Standard physicochemical and bacteriological methods were used to enumerate the total bacterial count of the effluent using pour plate methods after serial dilution. The bacterial isolates were characterized and identified using morphological, biochemical and sugar fermentation test. From the results obtained, the lowest Escherichia load was obtained from the source samples while the highest load was from plastic pond with values of 3.04139 and 3.36172 in log10 cfu/ml respectively. The lowest Salmonella species load obtained in this study was from source and concrete pond samples while the plastic pond samples also had higher load with values of 3.06069 and 3.27875 in log10 cfu/ml respectively. The total hardness values in this study is between 18.5 – 18.67 mg/l and falls below the recommended standard of 60-130mg/l for fish culture.Total dissolved solid, pH, alkalinity and turbidity are among the most important factors and exerts various effects on the vitality of microorganisms. From the result obtained pH, alkalinity, total dissolved solid and turbidity from 6.08-6.74, 39.67-51.33, 224.25-285.89 and 4.03-5.174 respectively and were all below the World Health Organization (WHO) permissible for safe water. The pathogenicity test conducted revealed that the isolates of interest were able to degrade DNase and hence they were pathogenic. The xiv antibiotic test conducted also showed that the isolates were multiple antibiotic resistant isolates and their resistant index ranged from 0.5 to 0.625 as against the 0.2 recommended by WHO. It is therefore important to monitor the quality of wastewater from fish ponds before being discharged into the environment to avoid possible outbreak of diseases.
