Gao Yaojie, a renowned dissident doctor who exposed the Aids epidemic in rural China, has died aged 95.
Dr Gao died of natural causes in New York, where she had been in exile since 2009, a friend of hers told the BBC.
Her work uncovered how businesses selling blood led to the spread of HIV in the countryside.
She was at the forefront of Aids activism in China and travelled across the country treating patients, often at her own expense.
A gynaecologist by training, Dr Gao encountered her first AIDS patient in the central province of Henan in 1996.
Selling blood was common in rural areas such as Henan, where Dr Gao lived, in the 1980s and 1990s.
Limited economic opportunities among farming communities left them with few other options to make a living – and blood-selling was often backed by local governments.
But with few cases of HIV being diagnosed in rural China at the time, and low awareness of the disease, blood was also collected from HIV+ patients, leading to the spread of the disease.
Dr Gao had claimed that 10 million people were infected with HIV in China, far greater than Beijing’s official figure of 740,000. But this was disputed by officials.
While Dr Gao was not the first the Chinese doctor to speak up about the country’s Aids epidemic, it was her work that gained the most attention at home and abroad.
She also won numerous awards for it.Chinese authorities were initially lenient but later grew uncomfortable with her criticism of officials.
She left China in 2009, in the face of surveillance and growing pressure from authorities.
She moved to New York eventually and lived there until she died. Despite her long absence from China, her death has been mourned by some Chinese online.
“She was a great figure. But young people nowadays may not know about that history,” said one user on social media platform Weibo.
“Our generation of news workers or news readers know her and remember her. It [the news] also reminded me of other Chinese doctors’ names such as Jiang Yanyong and Li Wenliang,” said Chinese journalist Li Weiao on Weibo, referring to the whistleblowers of the Sars outbreak of 2003 and the Covid pandemic respectively.
