Effectiveness of a rural sanitation programme on diarrhoea, soil-transmitted helminth infection and malnutrition in India.

A third of the 2.5 billion people worldwide without access to improved sanitation live in India, as do two-thirds of the 1.1 billion practising open defecation and a quarter of the 1.5 million who die annually from diarrhoeal diseases. We aimed to assess the effectiveness of a rural sanitation intervention, within the context of the Government of India’s Total Sanitation Campaign, to prevent diarrhoea, soil-transmitted helminth infection and child malnutrition.