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.

Wood, 71, a retired laboratory technician from Madeley, Shropshire, had been taking part in British trials of Vioxx when he died. The research was designed to establish whether the drug could be extended from its main purpose, relieving arthritis, to the prevention of colon cancer.

In doing so, Wood became one of numerous victims of a medical cataclysm highlighted this weekend by a court case in Texas, which saw the drug’s manufacturer, Merck Inc of New Jersey, ordered to pay £141.1m in damages to the widow of another Vioxx patient.

Dozens of British lawyers are now soliciting clients, while some experts calculate the global toll linked to Vioxx at up to 60,000 deaths.

“This,” Dr David Graham, a senior US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official, told a stunned Senate committee last November, “would be the rough equivalent of 500 to 900 aircraft dropping from the sky.”

He described it as “what may be the single greatest drug safety catastrophe”.

Although Margaret Wood has no plans to sue anyone, some lawyers believe she could have grounds. A Sunday Times investigation into the British connection to the Vioxx project has established that her husband was never told of all the possible risks when he was recruited for the trial.

This is the essence of what emerged from the court near Houston — that Merck did not disclose to patients all it knew about problems with the drug.

Margaret did not know, for example, that a doctor working on the trial had reported to Merck that the drug trial was “probably” to blame for Wood’s heart attack.

“I’m very, very angry,” said Margaret when I showed her confidential documents last month. “I wasn’t aware that there were any risks at all.”

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