A former Food and Drug Administration official testified that Merck & Co. had time to warn consumers that popular painkiller Vioxx increased the risk of heart attacks as soon as the evidence was first found.

The drug was pulled from the market in 2004, after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attacks. Former FDA official Richard Kapit says that there was plenty of time to alert the public before the death of Richard "Dickie" Irvin, whose widow sued the company after Irvin suffered a fatal heart attack in 2001.

The company alerted the FDA to the problem in 2000, however, the agency didn't approve a label change until 2002. However, Kapit says the company could have added a warning to the medicine's label as soon as it applied to the FDA to do so.

"The FDA is a bureaucracy ... you don't want to wait until it goes through all the records," he says.

The initial case ended in a mistrial last year. Testimony in the Irvin case is expect to last through next week.