A pin prick attack is an assault on another person with a needle or syringe tainted with the blood of somebody carrying a blood-borne disease, such as HIV.
Although tales of so-called "needle men" or white slavers, who supposedly injected unsuspecting young girls with morphine before carrying them away into a life of prostitution, had been around since the 1930s, the specific case of infection with blood borne diseases might have had its roots in a 1989 incident where ten teenage girls were arrested and later charged with stabbing numerous women with pins in the Upper West Side area of New York City.
[3] However, the American Center for Disease Control has stressed on numerous occasions that it has yet to confirm a single case of HIV as being transmitted in this fashion and has dismissed such emails as a hoax.
Despite immediate medical attention and the "one in 200" chance of being infected, Pearce tested positive for the disease a few months later, and died of an AIDS related illness in 1997 at age 28.
[9] In 1998, Richard J. Schmidt, a physician in Lafayette, Louisiana, was convicted of attempted murder after injecting a former lover, Janice Trahan, with HIV and Hepatitis C-tainted blood, claiming to be giving her a vitamin shot.