When walking down a narrow alley in a small north Chinese village in the mid-1990s, Dr Gao Yaojie heard a child crying desperately for its mother. “When I entered,” she later recalled, “I saw that the mother had hanged herself and the body was stiff.” The father had already died and the family was destitute after being defrauded by quack doctors.
In another village in Henan province, half the houses hung white paper emblems outside to signify a death. The villagers called it the “nameless fever”, and orphans were left to scavenge for food in the fields.
Gao, who has died aged 95, became their resolute champion, having discovered that Aids was raging in many rural districts because of contaminated blood. Before long she was banned from giving interviews to the press.
Henan health officials tried to challenge the diagnosis – because they were responsible. Driven by the entrepreneurial enthusiasm of Deng Xiaoping’s China, they ordered local medical centres to “focus on blood collection” so that the products could be sold. Often in league with unscrupulous “blood bosses”, blood from different donors would be poured into a vat, the plasma extracted by centrifuge, and the depleted blood transferred back to the donors. Entire villages joined in, hoping to raise cash for school fees or better houses, but HIV/Aids spread quickly.
In 1996 Gao, a gynaecologist still widely consulted after her retirement, encountered her first case of Aids, a female patient who had been infected from a blood transfusion. Delving deeper, she learnt of a “black blood market” in which hospital chiefs bought the blood and then resold it to patients.
Gao reported her findings to the provincial health bureau. The blood collection stations were formally banned, but the traffic continued. A fearless campaigner, Gao distributed leaflets, wrote books and did field research in the villages. She often stayed in the poorest accommodation to avoid being reported to local police.
Health officials in Beijing were more willing to admit the disaster, and a relatively frank report in 1998 jointly prepared with UNAids estimated that there were some 3 million donors in five provinces, many unemployed or migrants, who sold blood. Other national health experts spoke out, but the local cover-up continued, with claims that HIV/Aids was caused solely by drugs and sexual transmission, not by corrupt and negligent practice. By mid-2021 more than half a million were infected with HIV in Henan province.
Before retirement and her work as an Aids activist, Gao had already experienced a turbulent life, affected by the political upheavals of China in the 20th century. Born in Cao County, Shandong province, she came from a relatively well-off family whose male adults, including her father, Gao Shengtan, were kidnapped in 1939 by a communist guerrilla unit, forced to pay a huge ransom and then fled into Henan.
She graduated from the Henan University Medical School as an obstetrician in 1953. During the famine of the Great Leap Forward in 1959-61, Gao tried to help by sharing her food stamps earned as a government employee with starving women.
In 1967 – during the early and most violent phase of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 – the hospital where she worked was raided by Red Guards and Gao was beaten up and imprisoned in the morgue, according to one account, where she survived only on food smuggled in at night. But the services of experts were still needed and by 1974 she was practising again, shifting her focus to the study of chronic cancers in women.
After retirement in 1990 she was much in demand, lecturing in schools and workplaces on health safety and sexually transmitted diseases, leading a busy but tranquil life until she felt compelled to engage with the blood scandal.
In 2001 Gao was given the Jonathan Mann award at the US-based Global Health Council for her achievement as “an individual who has worked on promotion of health and human rights”. As often happens, the Chinese bureaucracy took action that proved counterproductive: Henan’s health department prevented Gao from obtaining a passport and the story became international news, while the Beijing authorities remained silent.
Still able to receive the prize money, she used it to print more Aids and STD prevention literature. She was named an “Asian Hero” by Time magazine, and was commended by the UN secretary general Kofi Annan for her AIDS prevention work.
Gao continued to campaign, earning some praise nationally but never free from harassment. In 2007 she was allowed to visit the US to collect another award, and met Hillary Clinton, then a senator, but still returned to China determined to pursue her work. In February 2009 when Clinton (as the new US secretary of state) visited Beijing and asked to see Gao, the two managed to meet in spite of local obstruction.
However, the strain of being constantly monitored took its toll on Gao, not least because of the impact on her family, who suffered from her reputation. Her husband, Guo Mingjiu, had died in 2006. Gao moved to the US later in 2009, where she was granted a visiting fellowship at Columbia University, New York, settled in Manhattan and continued to lecture on Chinese health.
Gao is survived by her daughters Guo Yanguang and Guo Jingxian, and her son Guo Chufei.
• Gao Yaojie, gynaecologist and campaigner, born 19 December 1927; died 10 December 2023
