A man with a sore throat died because a GP ignored warnings that he had an allergy to penicillin, a court was told yesterday.

David Townsend’s face swelled up “like a Michelin Man” and within 90 minutes of taking his first tablet he was dead from anaphylactic shock.

Mithra Nikkhah, the locum doctor who prescribed the antibiotic in May 2006, denies manslaughter through gross negligence.

Plymouth Crown Court heard that a prominent warning on the 73-year-old Mr Townsend’s medical records had been left off when they were transferred to a computer-based system.

The retired lorry driver’s widow told a jury that Dr Nikkhah insisted on giving her husband penicillin despite being told that he had suffered a serious allergic reaction 20 years earlier.

Mrs Townsend, 72, told the court that she went with her husband to the surgery because he had a sore throat and cough. They had been with the practice for 50 years and Mr Townsend had great faith in the doctors. She said: “He was a bit chesty and the doctor examined him and said, ‘I will prescribe penicillin’. I said, ‘He can’t have penicillin, he is allergic to it’, and David said the same.

“She said, ‘Well, I’ll give it to you and if he comes up in a rash then stop it’ and just wrote the prescription.”

Within minutes of swallowing the first tablet Mr Townsend had an adverse reaction. His widow said: “He was swollen up like the Michelin Man. He was all puffy. He looked dreadful. I phoned an ambulance right away. He was three times the size he normally was. He would normally tell me what was wrong with him, but he couldn’t because he was so swollen.” Dr Nikkhah, 41, who trained in Romania, was working as a locum in Plymouth at the time of Mr Townsend’s death, but has since moved to Dubai.

Philip Mott, QC, for the prosecution, said that both the Townsends had told Dr Nikkhah of his allergy. He said: “The key to this case is what happened in the surgery and what information Dr Nikkhah was given.

The jury will need to hear about that conversation and decide how clear and obvious it must have been to Dr Nikkhah that Mr Townsend firmly believed he was allergic to penicillin, so he should not have been prescribed it.

“If that was made clear to Dr Nikkhah and she prescribed it because there was nothing on her computer, then it was a fatal error and it points to gross negligence. To prescribe it in the face of such a warning was, in common terms, sheer stupidity and in legal terms it was gross negligence and the immediate trigger which led to his death. The jury will have to decide if Dr Nikkhah’s overruling of what was said to her was so risky and so dangerous and so negligent it deserves to be categorised as manslaughter.”

Dr Nikkhah told police that neither the patient nor his wife gave her a clear indication that he was allergic to penicillin. She said that they had said that he had suffered a problem with a drug, but were not sure which and information on his record suggested that it was with another antibiotic.

She thought that it was safe to prescribe penicillin V because he had previously been given different drugs of the same group and shown no adverse reaction. She said that she checked the computer records for information about an allergy before prescribing.

The trial continues.

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