A Chinese woman who contracted HIV during hospital surgery said she was attacked while she and other patients pleaded with the government for compensation.

Wang Qiuyun, 38, said a security guard at the central Chinese city of Hebi in Henan province threw her against some stairs and kicked her in the abdomenon Wednesday after she and three other female patients insisted on seeing the mayor.

The guard picked up a broom and threaten to beat her but was stopped by the other sufferers and guards.

"We are still here in the lobby of the government office building. No officials have come down to speak with us," said Wang Wednesday evening.

She had been at the office since 9 am.

Wang said she was infected in the largest hospital in the city of 1.4 million people during surgery in the 1990s, but she was unclear whether it was the surgery to remove a stomach tumor or to give birth.

A local court recently rejected Wang's lawsuit against the hospital.

"The courts should accept my case," Wang said. "I also want to know what the government policy is towards people like us. They've never told me what kind of assistance I'm supposed to get, what our rights are."

An employee who answered the phone at the government office denied anyone was beaten.

Like Wang, many people in China have been infected with HIV while receiving blood transfusions in hospitals before China's blood supply was cleaned up at the turn of the century.

Most victims only find out later as they develop symptoms but only a handful of patients have won lawsuits against hospitals.

Although Health Minister Gao Qiang has said the courts should take up the cases, local governments are afraid it can open a can of worms and lead to many people finding out that they were also infected and demanding compensation.

Other than offering free drugs to the infected, China provides little assistance.

Every day without fail, Cao Xiaoxian goes to a local government office, as he has for a year, to beg for help for his family.

His face drawn and tired, the 34-year-old has no choice -- he has AIDS, and so has his wife and his 11-year-old son.

The only one who may not be infected with HIV, the virus that causes the disease, is his 9-month-old baby daughter, but she is too young for a definitive test.

"This morning I went (to the government office) again. They told me the central government didn't give any instructions about which family should get help and which shouldn't," says Cao.

He was infected when he sold his blood to government blood stations collecting plasma to make blood products, as many farmers in central China do to help eke out a living.

Cao had to give up his part-time job as a delivery truck driver because the disease and the antiretroviral drugs he is taking leave him too weak to work.

"If he does any hard labor, he gets a fever," says his wife Zhou Xiaoneng, also 34.

Without any means of income, the couple live off their land and sometimes the generosity of donors.

To save money, they rarely eat meat, do not have a telephone and do not use the fan even in the hot summer, turning it on only briefly when guests visit.

"We have no money to even buy candy for our kids," Zhou says.

The family is no exception. Many other families with several members suffering from the deadly disease barely manage to survive.

Although billions of dollars is being spent on life-saving AIDS drugs across the world, donor governments are failing to ensure developing world patients have adequate diets, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned last week at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto.

The WFP joined the non-governmental organization Partners in Health here to warn that people getting antiretroviral therapies were much more likely to die if they were undernourished.

They said nutrition programs for HIV patients were critically underfunded, even though a lack of food was often cited by people living with the disease, most of them in the developing world, as their most urgent need.

Although China has been praised for launching a program to provide HIV-positive citizens with free drugs in 2003, it provides very little else, even for people like Cao who were victims of an unsanitary government-approved scheme to encourage poor farmers to sell blood beginning in the 1980s.

Families with AIDS receive a stipend of just 12 yuan (1.5 dollar) per person for month, but not everyone gets the money as some corrupt local officials have been known to siphon off funds, volunteers in villages with a high number of HIV/AIDS sufferers say.

Babies receive milk powder and children who have AIDS or whose parents have AIDS are supposed to get free tuition, but some people receive only a waiver for a part of their tuition.

An AIDS patient in another village, Qiudian, says she does not know how she and her husband will be able to put their teenage daughter through high school.

"If she doesn't get a scholarship, she will have to drop out of school," says Cheng Xiaolan, 38.

In Cheng's home, a brand-new washing machine which was part of her wedding dowry years ago, sits covered in the cardboard box it came in. The family no longer uses it because they need to save on the electricity bill.

"I hope the government will give us some economic assistance," Cheng says.

Patients like her also have to scrape together money to pay for medical expenses that the government does not pay.

"It's still not adequate," says Wiwat Rojanapithayakorn, the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS team leader in China, regarding the amount of support China provides to patients.

"They still don't pay for diseases associated with AIDS -- opportunistic diseases such as tuberculosis, liver problems, pneumonia and fungal infections," he says.

Around 650,000 people in China have the HIV virus, translating into a rate of 0.05 percent in a population of 1.3 billion, but the rate of infections is rapidly rising.

In 2006, 70,000 more Chinese contracted the virus, equivalent to 192 per day, according to official estimates, leading the government and outside experts to predict there could be 1.5 million cases by 2010.

California lawmakers passed a bill on Thursday to permit condom distribution in the state's prisons, where the HIV infection rate is eight times higher than on the streets of Los Angeles.

The bill now goes to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has not yet taken a position on it, according to his office.

California has the largest corrections system in the United States, with 162,000 mostly male inmates. Supporters say condoms are needed to stop the spread of HIV and AIDS among inmates and protect sexual partners of released prisoners.

The bill's author, Assemblyman Paul Koretz, said the HIV rate in state prisons is estimated to be eight times greater than among the general population of Los Angeles County.

AIDS activists launched protests on Thursday demanding the dismissal of South Africa's health minister as a new study said the country faced as many as 9 million new HIV cases by 2025 if the crisis is not contained.

The Treatment Action Campaign, nominated for a Nobel Peace prize in 2003 for its AIDS activism, said Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was to blame for an epidemic that kills more than 900 South Africans every day.

"We face a crisis of HIV infection, illness and death. Above all, we face a crisis of governance," the TAC said.

Protests were planned across the country, which with some 5.4 million HIV/AIDS cases is the epicenter of Africa's AIDS pandemic. TAC supporters were also expected to protest outside South African diplomatic missions abroad.

South Africa was in the spotlight at this month's global AIDS conference in Toronto, which criticized Mbeki's government for underplaying anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs and promoting home-grown AIDS treatments such as garlic, beetroot and lemon.

The TAC, credited with pressuring the government into launching a public ARV program in 2003, has in recent days resumed its protests with dozens of TAC members arrested last week for occupying government buildings in Cape Town.

Hundreds of TAC supporters gathered at Cape Town's main cathedral on Thursday, and organizers said more office occupations were possible.

"We are willing to risk arrest because our people are dying," local TAC spokeswoman Vuyiseka Dubula said.

The government says it has one of the biggest ARV drug treatment programs in the world but also insists nutrition and traditional medicine must be an integral part of that plan.

The TAC said Tshabalala-Msimang -- once dubbed "Dr. No" for her reluctance to promote ARV drugs -- had to go and demanded the government immediately convene a national meeting to discuss how to address the AIDS crisis.

"Today, under this Health Ministry and Department, the majority of people who die in South Africa die before they reach the age of 50," the TAC said.

GRIM FUTURE

The TAC protests came as a new study painted a grim future if South Africa's AIDS epidemic continues unabated.

Nathea Nicolay, a leading AIDS insurance risk consultant, said about 947 South Africans died from AIDS each day while 1,443 become infected with HIV. Altogether, more than 345,000 South Africans have died of causes linked to AIDS.

Nicolay said 577,000 South Africans were now sick with AIDS, and more than 500,000 of them -- including almost 27,000 children -- were not receiving ARV drugs, the only medicine known to halt the progress of the disease.

Nicolay's research, presented at a retirement funds conference in Durban this week, said a worst-case scenario would see 8.7 million new HIV infections by 2025.

But she said as many as 5.9 million of these could be averted if government and business coordinate their response on treatment and prevention, an intervention which could save as many as 2.5 million lives over the next two decades.

"One needs to keep in mind that the best way to prepare for the future is to help create it," she said.

Nearly two thirds of parliamentarians in India, which has the world's highest HIV/AIDS caseload, wrongly believe the virus can spread by sharing clothes with an infected person, a survey said.

The poll of 250 Members of Parliament in India's lower and upper houses of parliament, roughly a third of the total, showed that 56 percent felt a person could catch the HIV virus by sharing food and utensils with an infected person.

However, 76 percent of those questioned were aware that sex with multiple partners can cause AIDS and that using a condom would reduce the risk of contracting the virus.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the survey had some "provocative" findings.

"I believe this brings together some very interesting and provocative material on the perceptions and approach of our elected representatives in a vital area of national policy," he told lawmakers late on Wednesday.

The United Nations AIDS agency, UNAIDS, says India has an around 5.7 million people living with HIV/AIDS. But activists say the figure is higher as many people in rural areas may not know their status, while deaths due to AIDS are often ascribed to other diseases like tuberculosis.

Officials say one of the biggest problems they face in combating AIDS is misconceptions about how the virus is spread in a nation where open talk of sex is frowned on by many.

The "Person-to-Person Advocacy" survey, conducted by the Indian Association of Parliamentarians on Population and Development, also found 40 percent of lawmakers felt working with an infected person was enough to catch the disease.

Another 22.8 percent surveyed believed the virus could be spread by using a toilet that is also used by HIV-positive people.

"I am not surprised at all," said Anjali Gopalan, executive director of Naz Foundation India, a leading anti-AIDS group. "It shows that despite our efforts, we still have a lot more to do as the message is just not getting across."