Chinese AIDS activist Gao Yaojie Favorite 

Gao Yaojie (Chinese: 高耀潔, Gao Yaojie; 19 December 1927 – 10 December 2023) was a Chinese gynecologist, academic, and AIDS activist based in Zhengzhou, Henan, China. Gao was honoured for her work by the United Nations and Western organizations whilst spending time under house arrest. Her split with the Chinese authorities on the transmission and the seriousness of the AIDS epidemic in the People's Republic of China hindered her further activities, and she left for the United States in 2009, where she settled in Manhattan, New York.

In the 1990s, entire villages across central China had alarming numbers of people were testing positive for HIV. Many of these villages were in Henan province, where Gao had spent much of her childhood. Gao, who had by then retired, began investigating how the virus had entered China's countryside. She discovered that AIDS was spreading through ramshackle blood transfusion centers set up with official government backing. They enticed poor farmers to donate blood, from which the valuable plasma could be extracted. Poor hygienic practices like unsterilized and repeated use of needles, as well as pooling blood from multiple donors that would be reinjected back into people let HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — to spread with deadly efficiency.

Gao was one of the first people to speak out publicly, allowing Chinese media outlets to eventually write about how the sale of blood plasma was spreading HIV/AIDS. "My driving thought is: how can I save more people from dying of this disease?" Gao told Chinese filmmakers. "We each only live one life."

In late 1996, she began writing materials about preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS, and using her own funds to publish them. Her newsletter, Knowledge for HIV Prevention, was first released on 1 December 1996, World AIDS Day. She handed out the newsletter at bus stations in Zhengzhou, requesting that passengers bring the newsletter to their destinations in the countryside. It went to 15 issues and a total printing of 530,000 copies. The first issue was funded by the Henan Museum of Culture and History and the Song Qingling Foundation, but subsequent issues were funded by Gao, at the cost of between 3,000 and 5,000 yuan per issue. The newsletters were also distributed at the Henan Province Epidemic Station, family planning centers, and on buses and trains. In some cases, other newspapers and magazines worked with Gao to distribute her materials alongside their publications.

Gao died on December 10, 2023, at the age of 95 in exile, in New York City.