SHANGHAI, China — The threatening phone calls by angry officials are over. Government leaders who once shunned her now smile and say hello in public.
The reversal represents a victory of sorts for Gao Yaojie, a retired gynecologist who publicized the spread of AIDS through illegal blood buying in rural villages in the central Chinese province of Henan.
After years of official attempts to conceal the deadly outbreak, the government is acknowledging that hundreds of villagers are infected and that dozens have already died.
Gao said a deputy governor of Henan even went out of his way last week to greet her at an art exhibition.
The government still hasn't broken down and told Gao she was right. But it has stopped treating her as if she were trying to reveal state secrets, Gao, 74, told The Associated Press by telephone today.
"It's so quiet now," she said. "A couple of months ago, I was getting phone calls from government officials almost every day."
Gao stumbled onto the hidden epidemic in 1996, when one of her patients tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS.
Gao was able to link the infection to an illegal blood-buying industry in rural Henan. Since the 1980s, collectors had been paying villagers for their blood, extracting the valuable plasma and then reinjecting what was left back into donors' veins.
Donated blood was often pooled together, facilitating transmission of HIV.
Gao printed more than 300,000 fliers and 100,000 booklets to warn the villagers about the danger. She also paid for the treatment of infected children. She said she has spent more than $25,000 of her own money over the last five years.
Health officials at first ignored her and then grew hostile as her efforts drew Chinese and foreign media attention, she said.
In May, officials at the hospital where she had worked in Zhengzhou, Henan's capital, blocked her application for a passport to visit the United States to accept an award for anti-AIDS activism. Officials accused her of collaborating with "anti-Chinese foreign organizations," she said.
This month the government abruptly reversed itself and announced it was sending a team of health officials to open a clinic in the worst-hit village, Wenlou. On Thursday, a vice minister of health said an April survey of 1,645 Wenlou villagers found that 318 — or 19 percent — were HIV-positive. Among villagers who sold blood, an even larger proportion were infected — 244 out of 568, or 43 percent.
Officials are now examining blood supplies in all hospitals and donor centers in Henan, the Health Ministry's newspaper — Health News — said Friday. Police also are searching for illegal blood-buyers, known as "bloodheads," and government officials who helped them, it said.
"It's a good start that the government is beginning to acknowledge this problem and take action against it," Gao said.
"I am not sure how effective the crackdown will be or if the problem will just reappear after the campaign is over, but at least it's much better than before when the officials did nothing at all."