KILLED BY PAINKILLERS; Aspirin alert after coroner's outrage at 4,000

FOUR thousand people bleed to death every year after being prescribed cheap painkillers, a coroner has warned.

Doctors issue anti-inflammatory pills such as aspirin and diclofenac to reduce the pain of arthritis and other conditions.

But the painkillers can cause stomach bleeding which can, in extreme cases, be fatal.

Now coroner Dr Richard Whittington has written to health chiefs demanding that a new range of safer - but more expensive - drugs should be prescribed.

Around 2,500 arthritis patients die every year from stomach bleeds brought on by common pain-killing drugs known as NSAIDs - non- steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. A further 12,000 patients a year survive major stomach bleeds after emergency treatment. But Dr Whittington is convinced that the true toll is much higher because many cases go undetected.

In his Birmingham court he deals with several cases a month - and he believes the tragedies are preventable.

For the last three years new, safer painkillers known as COX 2s have are reluctant to prescribe them.

Dr Whittington said: "It is outrageous that so many people are dying. If we had lost as many in train crashes, people would be up in arms.

"They are avoidable deaths if doctors would only take a different approach when they come to prescribe pain-killing drugs."

NSAIDs are in the same group of drugs as aspirin and the ones most commonly prescribed are diclofenac, naproxen and piroxicam.

Dr Whittington said he believed the death toll from NSAIDs was probably higher than the accepted figure of 2,500. "It would not surprise me if it was more like 4,000 deaths."

A British Department of Health spokesman said doctors had been warned about the dangers of NSAIDs in 1988, and again in 1994.

A review was now under way about the need for new and stronger warnings.

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