Bausch & Lomb appoints new chairman and CEO.

After a year filled with a major recall and being purchased by a private equity firm, Rochester, NY-based Bausch & Lomb Inc. now will undergo more change with a new leader on board. Gerald Ostrov, a former head of rival Johnson & Johnson's vision care business, has been named Bausch & Lomb's chairman and chief executive.

He succeeds Ronald Zarrella, who took the helm at Bausch & Lomb in 2001. Although he retires this month, the company said Zarrella would stay on the board of directors as its chairman emeritus.

Bausch & Lomb, which went private in October after being purchased by Warburg Pincus for $3.67 billion, had its share of troubles last year. A recall of the company's ReNu with MoistureLoc multipurpose lens solution in May 2006 (after reports of potentially blinding fungal infections were traced to the product) led to more than 550 product liability lawsuits.

Ostrov, no stranger to the vision care market, spent eight years leading Johnson & Johnson's vision care business before leaving in 2006 to pursue other ventures. Prior to that post, he had been in charge of J&J's personal products business since 1991. (He also worked for the company earlier in his career during the 1970s.) Ostrov also spent nearly a decade in the 1980s working for Ciba-Geigy AG. Bausch & Lomb, which employs 13,000 and had $2.5 billion in sales last year, had been publicly traded for 69 years. It has said it could return to public ownership within the next five to seven years.