Environmental Toxicology and Ecological Risk Assessment

Biography

Biography: Eze Chukwuebuka ThankGod

Abstract

The issue of contamination of the environment by hospital and industrial effluent or wastewater has been an issue of concern to the public health of any area where these industries and hospitals are located. This study sets out to determine the level of contamination produced from different hospital wards by the discharge of hospital wastewater at Park Lane General Hospital Enugu, Nigeria. To this end, the microbial load and heavy metal analyses of the hospital wastewater were determined using established procedures. The wastewater samples were collected directly from the outlet of different wards labeled wws₁, wws₂ and wws₃ with pre-cleaned sterile and dried containers. The isolated pathogenic bacteria included both pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria species. The result of the microbial analyses showed mean total aerobic bacteria counts of 14.40 ± 0.86 x 10¹⁰ cfu/ml, 13.70 ± 0.65 × 10⁷ cfu/ml and 22.8 ± 1.14 ×10¹⁰ cfu/ml, for wws₁, wws₂ and wws₃ respectively. The mean total anaerobic bacteria counts gave 6.00 ± 1.60 × 10³ cfu/ml, 4.00 ± 2.50× 10³ cfu/ml and 1.70 ± 0.41 ×10⁴ cfu/ml for wws₁, wws₂ and wws₃ respectively. The result showed the presence of Candida albican-a pathogenic fungus as the only isolated fungi specie in wws₁ and wws₃ with a population of 1.70 ± 0.41 x 10³ cfu/ml and 2.3 ± 0.16 × 10⁵ cfu/ml respectively. No fungi were isolated from wws₂. The varying mean concentrations of the following heavy metal Arsenic, Cadmium, Lead, Mercury and Chromium were determined and most were found to be within the threshold of the WHO permissible limit of such metal. Therefore, it would be necessary to properly treat hospital wastewater before discharging into the environment to avoid the possible environmental health risk that might be associated with the discharge of such contaminated water. Close monitoring of the heavy metal concentration of the discharge water is also suggested.