Ecology, Environment and Conservation Paper

EVALUATION OF THE MICROBIAL CONTAMINATION RATE AT SWIMMING ZONES IN GUILAN CASPIAN SEA SOUTH COAST

1Habeeb Hoseinpour Roudsari, Balal Dayan2, Azam Sadat Mirroshandel3, Ebrahim Gholami4 and Mir Mozaffar Fallahchai5

Abstract

Caspian sea is the biggest brine lake in the world. And because of its rich and special geographical, ecological and biological environment that is provided a very suitable living condition for any sort of aquatic organisms. Unfortunately the entry of untreated industrial and urban sewages in rivers and also the urban solid waste and their extracts have been poured to sea by native coastal citizens that brought up many concerns about sea waters microbial quality for fisheries and entertaining usage and eventually all this will contaminate the sea. Therefore, using these natural swimming zones with having various contamination such as microorganisims are very dangerous for people and swimmers. The aim of this research is to evaluate the microbial contamination at swimming zone and its comparison with WHO standards. Three swimming zones (Anzali, Langroud, and Astara) were evaluating for total and feacal coliform counts. Also streptococcal contaminations were checked. The results demonstrated that the average of total and feacal coliform count in these areas were higher than WHO standersbut streptococcal counts averages were lower than WHO standards.