Impacts of sanitation upgrading to the decrease of fecal coliforms entering into the environment in China

Identifying the sanitation efficacy of reducing fecal contaminations in the environment is important for evaluating health risks of the public and developing future management strategies to improve sanitation conditions. In this study, we estimated the fecal coliforms (FC) entering into the environment in 31 provinces in China under three sanitation scenarios. Our calculation results indicated that, the current FC release is disparate among regions, and the human releases in the rural regions were dominant, accounting for over 90% of the total human releases. Compared with the human release, the FC release from the livestock was of similar magnitude, but has a quite different spatial distribution. In China Women's Development Program, the Chinese government set the target to make over 85% of the population in the rural access to the toilets in 2020. If the target set by the Chinese government is achieved, a decrease of 34% (12-54%) in the FC releases would be anticipated. In the future, the improvement in sanitation and accesses to the safe drinking water in the less developed regions, such as Tibet, Qinghai, and Ningxia, should be considered as a priority.