Gao Yaojie, a retired gynecologist who publicized the spread of AIDS in China through illegal blood buying in rural villages, no longer receives threatening phone calls or summons by angry officials. After years of official attempts to conceal the deadly outbreak in Henan province in Central China, the government is acknowledging that hundreds of villagers are HIV-infected and dozens have died.

Gao discovered the hidden epidemic in 1996 when one of her patients tested positive for HIV. She printed more than 300,000 flyers and 100,000 booklets to warn villagers of the dangers of selling or donating their blood to the illegal blood-buying industry. She said that she has spent more than $25,000 of her own money in the last five years.

Health officials at first ignored her, and then grew hostile as her efforts drew media attention. In May, officials of the hospital where Gao worked in Zhengzhou, Henan's capital, blocked her application for a passport to the United States to accept an award for AIDS activism. Chinese officials accused her of collaborating with "anti-Chinese foreign organizations," she said.

This month, the government abruptly reversed itself and sent in 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.

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