Veteran Chinese Aids activist Dr Gao Yaojie rarely receives visitors these days due to poor health, but she's still keen to spread her message, saying it's her duty to history.
'I want more people to know about the real Aids situation in China,' the 83-year-old said this week in her modest flat in New York. 'My books are banned in China. But through the media I hope more people will become aware of the issues I write about.
'Living is too painful for me. I am only living to finish these books, so I can leave these records in history.'
Gao left China and moved to the United States in August last year in order to be able to complete the books without government interference. Close to completion, they contain material she has written and collected since 1996, when she came across her first Aids patient, who contracted the deadly illness through a blood transfusion.
She's also updating her autobiography and thinking about what will come next.
'I don't want to die in the United States but I don't think I'll be able to go back to China,' Gao said. 'I want to book a flight back to China and die on the plane.'
A respected gynaecologist when she retired in the 1980s, Gao was 67 when she took on a new career, helping and campaigning for mainland HIV carriers and Aids patients, after learning about the 'plasma economy'. She found that illegal blood collection stations and shoddy transfusion practices in rural areas had kick-started an Aids epidemic,
