Drinking water monitoring is essential for identifying health-related risks, as well as for building foundations for management of safe drinking water supplies. However, statistical analyses of drinking water quality monitoring data are challenging because of non-normal (skewed distributions) and missing values. Therefore, a new method combining a water quality index (WQI) with spatial analysis is introduced in this paper to fill the gap between data collection and data analysis. Water constituent concentrations in different seasons and from different water sources were compared based on WQIs. To generate a WQI map covering all of the study areas, predicted WQI values were created for locations in the study area based on spatial interpolation from nearby observed values. The accuracy value of predicted and measured values of our method was 0.99, indicating good predication performance. Overall, the results of this study indicate that this method will help fill the gap between the collection of large amounts of drinking water data and data analysis for drinking water monitoring and process control.

Proper sanitation facilities promote health because they allow people to dispose of their waste appropriately. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese government has been committed to improving water and sanitation. The coverage of sanitary latrines in rural China reached more than 70.0% in 2022. Using published literature, open data, and national statistics, this study evaluated the health effects of improved latrines in China. A search strategy aimed at collecting all latrine improvement-related community intervention research in China from 1990 to 2021 was designed and implemented. Incidences of three diseases—schistosomiasis, diarrheal disease, and soil-transmitted helminths (STH)—were used as indicators of health benefits. The relationship between adjusted relative risk (RR) and coverage of sanitary latrines in the study area was examined using a log-linear model. Overall, 411 incidences of the three diseases before and after community intervention were extracted from 74 qualified articles. The results demonstrated the importance of promoting access to sanitary latrines in disease prevention and control in China. The overall estimates revealed mean reductions of 60% for diarrhea risk, 42% for schistosomiasis risk, and 65% for STH risk compared to no intervention. In addition, increasing sanitary latrine coverage was negatively correlated with RR in China, indicating that populations with high sanitary latrine coverage were less likely to be affected with water, sanitation, and hygiene-related diseases.