Study on Drinking Water Quality Served in Restaurants and Tea Stalls in Gazipur Area

Abstract

Drinking water is one of the most important factor related to human health as the intake of drinking water is a daily necessity that can’t be avoided. However people going outside home for various purposes are unable to consume drinking water from their households and have to depend on outside sources such as restaurants and in some cases tea stalls. In Bangladesh, the water served in this outside sources are of questionable quality due to the lack of proper monitoring from the authority. The objective of this study is to collect drinking water sample from these sources with a view to analyze the quality of water served. Both laboratory testing and field observation data are to be collected and analyzed. The study aims to develop a risk assessment system based on the data collected and assign the respective risk scores to the individual sources and to determine whether or not they pose health risk to the consumers and if yes, then to what degree of risk is posed by the sample. A study period from February 2019 to October 2019, when 173 water samples were collected from different restaurants and tea stalls located in Gazipur city. The field observation included both observation and questionnaire survey. The primary results obtained from the experiment shows that most of the samples have water quality within the safe limits in case of physical and chemical parameters of laboratory testing. However, the bacteriological test values were unsatisfactory in most cases as they indicated very high probability of microbial contamination in most of the samples, indicating possible health risk. The observational parameter values in those cases indicates that the storage and hygiene condition of the restaurants are the probable reason for such contamination. A health risk scoring system was then developed and compared. Of the 173 samples. Only 46 samples (26.6%) were marked safe in overall values, the other samples were marked from slight to high health risks. Another important discovery from this study is that the absence of certain element and its ions (sulphate ions) in groundwater of the study area, except for the banks of Turag rivers. This may result from the infiltration of the water from the river which is known for being contaminated with industrial wastes. Further study on water infiltration is required to confirm this hypothesis