A Critical View of “On TB Vaccines, Patients’ Demands, and Modern Printed Media in Times of Biomedical Uncertainties: Buenos Aires, 1920–1950”

The Abalaka's vaccine, claimed to be curative for HIV infection in Africa, provides a rather similar case in contemporary times.

Dr Novoa Santos (1885–1933) was a well-known Spanish physician and professor of pathology at the medical school of Madrid after several years in the same position at Santiago de Compostela. In 1932 he visited Buenos Aires, invited by the Spanish Cultural Institution (an agency of the Spanish embassy to promote diffusion of Spanish culture), lecturing at the schools of philosophy and medicine of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, among other institutions. He spent four months in Argentina, together with his wife and children, and then returned to Spain, where the next year he was diagnosed as suffering from gastric cancer, which ended his life after surgery. During the Buenos Aires stay, he met Pueyo and provided him with a recommendation for Professor Bachmann. Interestingly, Novoa Santos’s expertise did not include tuberculosis or infectious diseases and his link to Pueyo is not very clear.

The requirement, in drug approvals, for efficacy to be demonstrated did not begin in most Western countries until after the USA FDA reform of 1962.

The authors do not provide the concentration of phenol they found. Phenol is a toxic compound that is still used as a component of multi-dose formulation as a preservative in very low concentration.