Investigation: Victims of drug that took a hidden tollBrian Deer on the emerging tragedy of the painkiller Vioxx
August 21, 2005

WHEN Kenneth Wood died of a heart attack two years ago on the day he was supposed to go on holiday to America, his wife Margaret blamed herself.

Should she have given him an aspirin, she wondered, to thin his blood as he lay complaining of chest pains? The ambulance crew had done that straight away. Could she have done more to galvanise the hospital? The doctors, she felt, had looked confused.

“The shock was that he was so active,” said Margaret, 64. “He used to go bowling six nights a week, right up until the day before he died.”

Last September she got another shock when Vioxx, a painkilling “wonder drug”, was taken off the market after a clinical trial in America had shown a link to heart attacks.

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