In a recent study published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine several authors propose a new way of monitoring drugs that could increase the margin of safety for consumers. Utilizing internal documents from the Vioxx litigation, Dr. Joseph S. Ross of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York and others set out a method of analyzing clinical studies and post-marketing surveillance data that showed had Merck utilized their method, the cardiovascular risk of Vioxx would have been known two years before Merck withdrew the drug from the US market.