Exploring the impact of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), early adequate feeding and access to health care on urban–rural disparities of child malnutrition in China

To explore the effects of UNICEF‐suggested modifiable factors, that is, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), early adequate feeding and health care on child malnutrition, and to examine the extent to which each factor contributes to urban–rural disparities of child malnutrition in China. Pooling two waves of regionally representative survey data from Jilin, China, in 2013 and 2018, we report on urban–rural relative risks (RRs) in the prevalence of child stunting, wasting and overweight. We employ Poisson regression to examine the effects of urban–rural setting and the three modifiable factors on the prevalence of each malnutrition outcome, that is, stunting, wasting and overweight. We perform mediation analyses to estimate the extent to which each modifiable factor could explain the urban–rural disparities in each malnutrition outcome. The prevalence of stunting, wasting and overweight were 10.9%, 6.3% and 24.7% in urban, and 27.9%, 8.2% and 35.9% in rural Jilin, respectively. The rural to urban crude RR was 2.55 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.92–3.39) for stunting, while the corresponding RRs for wasting and overweight were 1.31 (95% CI: 0.84–2.03) and 1.45 (95% CI: 1.20–1.76), respectively. The rural to urban RR for stunting reduced to 2.01 (95% CI: 1.44–2.79) after adjusting for WASH. The mediation analyses show that WASH could mediate 23.96% (95% CI: 4.34–43.58%) of the urban–rural disparities for stunting, while early adequate feeding and health care had no effects. To close the persistent urban–rural gap in child malnutrition, the specific context of rural China suggests that a multi‐sectoral approach is warranted that focuses on the sanitation environment and other wider social determinants of health.