China lets AIDS doctor collect U.S. rights prize

Gao Yaojie has been invited to receive a prize from Vital Voices, a U.S. group, that recognizes her pioneering role in exposing and fighting the spread of HIV in rural central China, where many thousands of poor farmers who sold blood in the 1990s were infected.

Gao, 80, had abandoned hope of personally collecting the prize because police in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, had blocked her since early February from going to Beijing to obtain a visa.

On Friday night, however, a senior province official visited Gao and told her she could now go to Washington. Indeed, the government would help her get the visa.

"I told him I didn't need the help," Gao told Reuters on Saturday. "I don't think they expected such a big fuss. I'm just an ordinary person, but they underestimated things."

After the visit from Chen Quanguo, a deputy Communist Party chief of Henan, the police who had stood outside her apartment for the past two weeks disappeared, Gao said.

Melanne Verveer, chairwoman of Vital Voices, welcomed the Chinese government's apparent backdown.

"Dr. Gao expressed her joy and desire to accept the award in person, and we are pleased that it now appears her wish will be realized," she said in an e-mailed statement.

Gao, who speaks Chinese with the heavy burr of Henan, her home province, is well-known in China and received warm local media coverage until her unflinching criticism of official complicity in the spread of AIDS became too much.

The local media has been silent about her recent detention.

She helped bring to light the spread of AIDS in Henan, where during the 1990s commercial blood stations often controlled by officials spread the HIV virus among farmers who sold their plasma and then -- to save payments to them -- were retransfused with mixed and infected batches of left-over corpuscles.

Gao was barred from travelling abroad to collect two other prizes, one for human rights and public health in 2001 and the other for public service in 2003.