On the eve of World AIDS Day, activists gathered Monday outside San Francisco's City Hall to demand that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger not make any cuts to a state program that provides medications to low-income patients with HIV and AIDS.

World AIDS Day began Dec. 1, 1988. The good news, 21 years later, is that overall HIV/AIDS infections are down by 17 percent. The bad news is that the disease has become the leading cause of death among black and Latino women in United States, a chilling percentage of whom have children. Potential budget cuts threaten to drive the number of cases even higher.

While being diagnosed with HIV no longer is considered a death sentence as it was until just recently, state funding to the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, which provides medications to low-income Californians, is under threat, according to Project Inform in San Francisco.

The assistance program could face a budget shortfall in 2010-11 of as much as $100 million if the governor does not fund the group fully, said Dana Van Gorder, Project Inform executive director.

"They're talking about removing up to 8,500 clients who rely on ADAP for their medication," he said. "They're talking about cutting clients who make more than $20,000 a year. They're talking about creating a waiting list."

Several speakers said they would have died if not for the medications the AIDS Drug Assistance Program helped them acquire.

"When I was diagnosed five

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years ago, I went to visit my family, and I told my brother how I wanted to be buried," said San Francisco resident Jason Villalobos, 30. "I suggested we all take a family portrait before I got too sick so my family could remember me looking healthy. I went to my grandfather and apologized for allowing this to happen to our family."

Instead of dying, Villalobos said he was finally able to thrive thanks to the medications the program helped him to receive.

Loren Jones, 57, of Berkeley. said she has lived with HIV for 25 years and narrowly avoided having it escalate into full-blown AIDS by getting on a single daily pill called Atripla.

"I'm not a pill-popper. I only take the one pill each day," she said. "That costs $17,000 a year. And that's about as low as it goes for treatment."

Schwarzenegger has not made even preliminary decisions about the budget he will provide to the Legislature in early January, said H.D. Palmer, deputy director of the state Department of Finance. He added, however, that when Schwarzenegger used his line-item veto to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from state programs in late July, he left the AIDS Drug Assistance Program untouched.

HIV/AIDS continues to be the leading cause of death among black and Latino women ages 25 to 44, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. About three-quarters of the women were infected by heterosexual contact, and another 26 percent through injection drug use, the department reported earlier this year.

The news is particularly dire in Oakland, the epicenter of the disease in Alameda County, which consistently ranks among the highest in the state in terms of HIV/AIDS.

Oakland contains the highest percentage of diagnosed AIDS cases among women of any major metropolitan area in the western United States — a large percentage of them black, according to the Alameda County Health Department.

In response, the National Coalition of 100 Black Women will be discussing prevention of HIV/AIDS among black women from 4 to 5 p.m. today at Beebe Memorial Cathedral, 3900 Telegraph Ave., as part of the "Sistahs Getting Real about HIV/AIDS" billboard campaign. Free HIV testing will be available from 4 to 8 p.m.

The event is one of many in the Bay Area to mark World AIDS Day nearly three decades since the first confirmed case was diagnosed in 1981.

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that about 1 million people in the United States are living with HIV and AIDS, and about a quarter do not know they are infected, putting others at risk of contracting the virus that attacks the body's immune system, which ordinarily defends against disease.

Of the 7,400 AIDS cases diagnosed in Alameda County from 1980 to 2007, more than half were in Oakland, according to the California Prevention and Education Project. All but 200 of those cases were African-Americans and Latinos, the organization reported. Yet a decade after the city declared a state of emergency over the disease in the African-American community, many residents do not get diagnosed with HIV until they have full-blown AIDS.

For information on AIDS treatment in the East Bay, go to www.altabatessummit.org/clinical/aids_scvs.html or call 510-869-8400.