Water Supply and Sanitation in The People's Republic of China - Links To Poverty, Health, and Hygiene

Links To Poverty, Health, and Hygiene

Health problems caused by the lack of safe water are exacerbated by poor sanitary conditions, especially in rural China. Traditionally, Chinese households collect human waste and transport it to the fields for use as fertilizer, often without further treatment. Latrines are common in rural areas. Some are rudimentary, being unprotected from flies and other disease vectors, while others are odorless and insect-free. Composting toilets that promise high rates of pathogen destruction are common. The availability of public and school latrines in rural areas that met sanitary standards was low in the late 1990s. The government has made a concerted effort to promote good health-related behaviors. In most rural areas, a network of National Patriotic Health Campaign Committee (NPHCC) workers, the All-China Women's Federation representatives, the Communist Youth League of China, local epidemic prevention stations, and schools have led health education campaigns encouraging a wide array of hygienic behaviors. That work, combined with a high literacy rate (even in poor areas), has led to widespread knowledge of many basic health behaviors, such as the importance of drinking boiled water. However, actual behavioral change has been slow to follow, especially in poor areas where fuel may be scarce and understanding of the link between raw water or unwashed hands and diarrhea is tenuous. Thus, the problem is more one of the effectiveness of health messages than of their dissemination: In the late 1990s, health education in most rural areas provided little concrete information to link hygienic behavior to improved health, and most provinces still lacked specialized health education training. As a result, significant disparities exist between poorer and wealthier rural counties, both among and within provinces in China. While a number of wealthier and middle-income rural counties have experienced tremendous health-related benefits as a result of improvements in water supply and sanitation, poorer counties with more limited resources have yet to receive similar benefits. In Minqin county, Inner Mongolia, "10,000 people have left the area and have become shengtai yimin, “ecological migrants".