China has made available sanitary toilets to about 74 per cent of its rural housholds, reducing incidents of communicable diseases, the government said today.
By 2015, China aims to increase the tally to 75 per cent and by 2020 the proportion will rise to 85 per cent, said Zhang Yong, deputy head of National Health and Family Planning Commission.
A sanitary toilet in rural China refers to a toilet under a roof with walls and a standard digestion tank. It can either be dry or flush, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
China had allocated about 8.3 billion yuan (about USD 1.3 billion) to build 21 million rural toilets in 2004.
Thanks to the programme, cases of diarrhoea, typhoid fever and hepatitis A have decreased over the past decade, Zhang said.
The government expects to raise construction standards for sanitary toilets and introduce better waste processing technology.
Sanitary toilets help curtail breeding of mosquitoes and flies, and prevent disease.
A report by the United Nations Children's Fund and the World Health Organisation in 2012 showed 2.5 billion people worldwide still practiced open defecation or lacked adequate sanitation.
