Abstract:
Water is essential to life, and access to safe drinking water is a fundamental human right as well as a basic human need. The little awareness of the Ambo town community about the impact of water quality status in the town leads the researcher to plan for investigation. The main objective of this study was to assess access to potable water, the status of sanitary practice and hygiene at ambo town, West Ethiopia. The data was gathered both experimentally and through questionnaires from households and analyzed by frequency, correlation, and regression. Due very limited time, and resources, only 30 households were participated. The majority of the households 23(76.67%) treated their drinking water in the study area. However, most of them (40%) were cleaning their containers every week. And also, most of them (66.7%) were using a pit latrine. It was also observed that the majority of them (76.67.8%) have hand washing facilities with soap and water. But most of them, 22 (73.33%), never got an education from health extension workers. The occurrence of E. coli and enterococci was 100 % in raw water however this count was highly reduced to insignificant after the water is treated and at households level that may indicate the efficiency of the treatment plant. On the other hand the occurrence of E. coli and Enterococci at house hold level vary between the house hold tap and water fetching materials that reflect the handling practice of each house hold after collecting from tap. The comparison we made for the concentration of fecal indicator bacteria at house level, we observed that highest concentration of E. coli and Enterococci at HHT1 and at HHC1. This is might be attributed to the household’s tap water pipes might be rusted and allowed for the bacteria to grow and the households water fetching materials were greatly contaminated. This may reflect the water handling practice of that house hold. There is strong correlation between E. coli and Enterococci in both wet and dry season. They may indicate that one of them is a surrogate for another in surveillance of drinking water. In general, there were better access potable water and high proportion of using tap water enhanced the town community to be less vulnerable to water borne disease. However, there would be a great work to be done to parallelize with the WHO guide line
