Grandmother Courage

She’s just a retired country doctor, but GAO YAOJIE refuses to keep quiet about the plague ravaging China

——By HANNAH BEECH (Original URI)

Grandmas aren’t supposed to raise hell. In general, they potter around their crammed apartments, grumble about their senile husbands and make endless mugs of tea for visitors. Gao Yaojie, a tiny 75-year-old from China’s central Henan province, does all that—and a great deal more.

In 1996, the retired doctor examined a patient complaining of what he called “the strange disease.” Then came another with “no-name fever.” And another with “weird sickness.” Alarmed, Gao notified provincial medical officials that thousands of peasants who had sold plasma to illegal blood banks during the mid-1990s were all being struck by the same deadly affliction: AIDS. Dirty needles and recycled blood, she discovered, had led to HIV infection rates of more than 50% in some Henan villages. In the village of Wenlou, for instance, three generations of one family died within a two-month period. Gao estimates that up to 100,000 people in Henan might be infected with HIV.

Instead of being lauded for her handy detective work, Gao herself was put under investigation. Local cadres told her to keep quiet, lest she bring bad p.r. to the province. Gao’s phone was tapped and her mail seized. “They thought they could scare me into not saying anything,” says Gao.”But what can they do to an old woman like me?”

Undeterred, the diminutive doctor donned her frayed Mao jacket and, defying official orders, printed up hundreds of thousands of flyers and pamphlets to educate rural residents about AIDS. Gao has also spent thousands of dollars of her own pension to buy medicine for the sick of Henan. For her energetic endeavors, she was awarded the Jonathan Mann Award, a $20,000 prize from the Global Health Council. But the government, afraid that she would expose China’s dirty secret, barred Gao from traveling to the U.S. to accept the honor. Instead, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan attended the ceremony in her place.

After years of playing dumb and losing valuable time to educate its citizens, Beijing has admitted that China has a burgeoning AIDS problem. But Gao is not convinced by the government’s plodding “Five Year Plan” to stem the disease. Despite their big talk, Beijing cadres have only admitted to the existence of one AIDS village in Henan, ignoring the dozens of other hamlets where HIV is flourishing. Nor is the much-publicized money the government has sent anywhere near enough to treat the thousands of farmers who die before ever knowing the name of the disease that killed them.

Meanwhile, the nation is projected to have 10 million HIV-positive citizens by 2010. “The government says their plan will prevent an AIDS epidemic,” Gao says. “But even an old woman like me knows the problem has already reached epidemic proportions.” While the authorities continue to downplay China’s AIDS problem, Henan’s peasants know they can count on a wrinkled woman named Grandma Gao.