Gao Yaojie will be tried for defamation at a court in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province on Tuesday, China Newsweek reported.

Gao, who won the 2001 Jonathan Mann award for her efforts in fighting an AIDS epidemic in central Henan province, had been critical of a medicine made by Li Demin that claimed to eliminate the HIV virus that causes AIDS within two minutes, the report said.

The 77-year old doctor, however, never named Li in her criticisms of the medicine, it said.

"They claim to have experimented in traditional Chinese medicines, that they were specialists and anti-AIDS magicians, the more a sickness is difficult to cure, the more they held that their medicines were effective," Gao wrote in a tract that she sent to Li, the report said.

Gao claimed that far from curing AIDS patients, Li's medicine caused the deaths of several patients.

In Wenlou village, known as the AIDS village for the number of people that were infected with HIV during unsanitary blood donations beginning in the 1980s, about a dozen people tried Li's concoction, the report said.

Luo Huanjun, an infected villager interviewed by the weekly, said he felt none of the miraculous results that the potion had promised, while his wife fell into a coma and then died after taking the medicine.

Liu Xiangshu, another AIDS patient in Wenlou, said however he felt better after taking the medicine, the report said.

Gao has faced intimidation by provincial authorities ever since she began campaigning for better care for AIDS patients and an AIDS education program in 1996, when the epidemic in Henan was discovered.

Up to a million people are believed to have been infected with HIV in Henan through government-backed unsanitary blood collections that continued through the early 1990s.

TERRA.WIRE