Beijing: Chinese authorities manhandled and detained AIDS patients who were demanding increased government support and access to medical records that would help prove they were infected through hospital blood transfusions, protesters said today.

Police detained 15 AIDS patients from Henan province in Beijing today, where they had gone to push for better medical care and compensation for victims, said Sun Ailing, one of 13 others in the group who were not taken by police.

The reported rough treatment points to the government's lingering reluctance to acknowledge past incompetence that caused the virus to spread widely in the central province of Henan during the 1990s. Many of those infections have been linked to unhygienic blood-buying rings that allegedly operated with official protection.
 
Sun said protesters planned to visit the petition office under the State Council tomorrow, where Chinese citizens can legally file complaints. "Let them detain us, more will always come," Sun said.

On Monday, 18 AIDS patients were forcibly removed from the Ningling County Women and Children's Hospital in Henan after staging a sit-in to demand copies of their medical records, protesters said. The group included 15 women who had received blood transfusions there, along with three men who had contracted the virus from their wives, said protester Xu Xianli in a telephone interview today.

Source : PTI