Assessing Drinking Water Quality at the Point of Collection and within Household Storage Containers in the Hilly Rural Areas of Mid and Far-Western Nepal

Abstract

Accurate assessments of drinking water quality, household hygenic practices, and the mindset of the consumers are critical for developing effective water intervention strategies. This paper presents a microbial quality assessment of 512 samples from household water storage containers and 167 samples from points of collection (POC) in remote rural communities in the hilly area of western Nepal. We found that 81% of the stored drinking water samples (mean log10 of all samples = 1.16 colony-forming units (CFU)/100 mL, standard deviation (SD) = 0.84) and 68% of the POC samples (mean log10 of all samples = 0.57 CFU/100 mL, SD = 0.86) had detectable E. coli. The quality of stored water was significantly correlated with the quality at the POC, with the majority (63%) of paired samples showing a deterioration in quality post-collection. Locally applied household water treatment (HWT) methods did not effectively improve microbial water quality. Among all household sanitary inspection questions, only the presence of livestock near the water storage container was significantly correlated with its microbial contamination. Households’ perceptions of their drinking water quality were mostly influenced by the water’s visual appearance, and these perceptions in general motivated their use of HWT. Improving water quality within the distribution network and promoting safer water handling practices are proposed to reduce the health risk due to consumption of contaminated water in this setting.

A Bayesian Belief Network model to link sanitary inspection data to drinking water quality in a medium resource setting in rural Indonesia

“…Our BBN models (1B and 2B) showed that the water quality at POCs critically affected the water quality at the POU in the study area, which has also been found by others 6 , 42 . We also found that types of water source used by the households determine the drinking water quality that they have at home, similar to the findings in rural Honduras 43 .…”

“…Furthermore, we were able the analyse the water quality at POU by considering not only the water management and hygiene situation at home, but also the broader scope, such as the situation at the water source. Moreover, the conventional statistical analysis methods, e.g., bivariate correlation or regression analyses, often quantify the effect of the individual variable on water quality, but not a combination of variables or pathways 6 , 10 , 16 . The BBN approach was able to simulate both the effects in one model and can then help to prioritise the interventions that improve the water quality at household level, i.e., either targeting one variable or combination of multiple variables.…”

“…Groundwater, which is considered safer than surface waters, is also found contaminated in many locations 3 . In Addition, high levels of contamination has been found at the household level in LMICs and water quality often deteriorates after collection 4 – 6 .…”

“…Attempts have been made to link SI data to drinking water quality in order to be able to judge the reliability of the system. The most common approach has been to analyse the SI and drinking water quality by using statistical analyses, e.g., bivariate correlation or regression analyses, especially in high resource settings 6 , 10 , 13 – 16 .…”

Association of nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene practices with children’s nutritional status, intestinal parasitic infections and diarrhoea in rural Nepal: a cross-sectional study

“…Additionally, we observed that animals were often kept in or near the home and brought indoors overnight. Such practices have been shown to increase exposure to faecal contamination in the household environment in other rural settings [15,[57][58][59]. Other studies conducted in India and Bangladesh highlighted the importance of faecal contamination of animal origin in the domestic environment, including source and stored drinking water, hands, and soil [43,44].…”