In September, the World Health Organization released a statement claiming that HIV and Heroin use are on the rise, with about half of new HIV infections in Greece being self-inflicted to enable people to receive benefits of €700 per month and faster admission on to drug substitution programs". The World Health Organization has acknowledged this statement as a fallacy, stating that it was merely an editing error. While it is true that there is an increasing rate of HIV infections in Greece, reports of the rising HIV infections from Greek sources state that about half of new infections are from intravenous drug injection, but intentional self-infection is only a suspicion held against problem users.
According to a retraction issued by the WHO this morning, the statement was supposed to state that "Half of the new HIV cases are self-injecting and out of them few are deliberately inflicting the virus." This statement caused a lot of controversy in Greece, with many public officials and heads of state issuing statements of disappointment with the WHO for their mistake. The claim originated from a study conducted by the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the University of California, San Francisco according to an email from a spokeswoman for the Institute of Health Equity. That report only indicated that a few cases of intentional infection were found and that probably only includes addicts.