Figure 6.

Decrease in life expectancy caused by infectious diseases from 1978 to 2018

Impact of the 11 studied VPDs on life expectancy from 1978 to 2018 (the lines were smoothed by using locally estimated scatterplot smoothing regression). The life expectancy from 2004 to 2018 was calculated from the census data of China in 2010. Since we did not have data for the third and fourth censuses, which were conducted in 1982 and 1990, the life expectancy from 1978 to 2003 was calculated according to the census data of China in 2000. We were unable to obtain the incidence data of each age group for measles, meningococcal meningitis, and Japanese encephalitis from 1978 to 2003 and for hepatitis A and hepatitis B from 1990 to 2003. We used the incidence ratios of each age group in 2004 for our calculation. The incidence ratio of each age group in 2017–2018 was calculated according to the incidence ratio in 2016. For better comparison, the age-specific proportion of each disease was calculated as the proportion of the 11 studied diseases.