It seemed simple enough at the time. In 2009, John Harrison, a 63–year-old oil industry sales manager in Mission, Texas, had surgery to repair the rotator cuff in his right shoulder, a routine procedure that usually requires at most a single night’s stay in the hospital, followed by physical therapy. For Harrison, however, there was nothing routine about the ordeal that ensued.

In the weeks following the surgery, his scar turned bright red, hot to the touch, and oozed thick fluid that looked “like butter squeezed from a bag.” Alarmed, Harrison’s wife, Laura, called The Methodist Hospital in Houston, where the surgery was performed. The doctor urged Harrison to immediately make the seven-hour drive back to Houston for an emergency checkup.

That night, surgeons opened up Harrison’s shoulder and found that infection had eaten away part of his shoulder bone and rotator cuff. Screws and metal hardware surgeons placed in his shoulder had pulled loose. Sutures had come undone. Surgeons cleaned out Harrison’s shoulder, installed two drains and gave him antibiotics to battle the infection.

When Harrison awoke from that surgery, he imagined his nightmare was over. But in reality, it had just begun. Since then, what began as a simple operation has turned into a lengthy struggle that left him for months at a time dependent on hired nurses, unable to dress himself, take a shower, or work, and afraid for his life.

“I’m a pretty tough guy, being in the oil patch,” said Harrison, a soft-spoken man who tends to understate the severity of his ordeal. But the pain “felt like someone hit your shoulder with a baseball bat with a razor blade attached to it.”

In a case followed around the world, two former executives of a Swiss building-products conglomerate were convicted in Italy Monday of causing the asbestos-related deaths of more than 3,000 people.

Each defendant — Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny, former owner of the Eternit conglomerate, and Belgian baron Louis de Cartier de Marchienne, a major shareholder in the firm — was sentenced to 16 years in prison on a charge of involuntary manslaughter.

Schmidheiny, 64, and de Cartier, 90, were accused of exposing workers at four Italian asbestos cement factories — as well as people who lived near the plants — to asbestos fibers, which can cause deadly diseases such as mesothelioma, a virulent cancer that attacks the lining of the lung or abdominal cavity.

In 2010, the Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the BBC jointly produced an investigation into the global asbestos trade, “Dangers in the Dust”, which revealed the tactics used by makers of asbestos building materials to market their products in developing nations despite overwhelming evidence of the fire-resistant mineral’s lethality.

Several activists said that Monday’s verdict in Turin, Italy, which came after a two-year trial before a three-judge panel, could send a powerful message to corporate officials who fail to control toxic exposures. The World Health Organization estimates that 125 million people are exposed to asbestos on the job and more than 100,000 die each year of mesothelioma, lung cancer or asbestosis.

All the attention paid to the debacle about coverage for contraceptives over the past several days obscured a broader, undisputed win for all consumers, including those who are pregnant or about to be pregnant.

While the media was obsessing about the contraceptives controversy, the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a final rule that even the Catholic bishops should support. Starting this fall, insurers and employers that offer health care benefits must provide us with more clearly written information about what their benefit plans cover and how much of our own money we’ll have to pay if we get sick, injured or, yes, pregnant.

This is no small matter. Rumors had been circulating in Washington over the past several months that the administration would cave to the demands of the insurance industry’s trade organization that this requirement be gutted to the point of being meaningless for most Americans. The rule requiring that this information be written in plain English was part of the health care reform law.    

The powerful insurers’ group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), reportedly was hard at work early last week trying to persuade its friends in Congress, including some Democrats, to flood the White House with calls urging that the new requirement be postponed indefinitely and apply only to benefit plans sold outside of the workplace. That would mean that the requirement, if ever implemented, would be of value to only a small percentage of Americans.

MONTPELIER, Vermont — You can’t see them. They’re hidden from view and probably always will be. But the health insurance industry’s big guns are in place and pointed directly at the citizens of Vermont.

Health insurers were not able to stop the state’s drive last year toward a single-payer health care system, which insurers have spent millions to scare Americans into believing would be the worst thing ever. Despite the ceaseless spin, Vermont lawmakers last May demonstrated they could not be bought nor intimidated when they became the first in the nation to pass a bill that will probably establish a single-payer beachhead in the U.S.

When he signed Act 48 into law on May 27, surrounded by dozens of state residents who worked for many years to achieve universal coverage, Governor Peter Shumlin expressed great pride in what had been accomplished.

“We gather here today to launch the first single payer system in America, to do in Vermont what has taken too long—to have a health care (system) that is the best in the world, that treats health care as a right and not a privilege, where health care follows the individual, not the employer,” Shumlin said.

The problem for Shumlin and his allies is this: it will take five years before Vermont can fully implement its new system, partly because the federal health care reform law prohibits states from undertaking more far-reaching reforms until 2017 unless granted waivers from the feds to do so. And though Vermont’s Congressional delegation is on board to pursue a waiver that would let the state set up a single payer system two years from now, the insurance industry’s friends in Washington are not keen to let that happen. That’s because they want to use those five years to persuade Vermonters that they really don’t want to go the single payer route after all.

The Costa Rican government has launched a study into the causes of chronic kidney disease in its sugarcane producing northern region. At the same time one of the country’s biggest sugar producers said it is revamping its worker health and safety policies.

The steps follow an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that explored the mysterious and largely overlooked epidemic of chronic kidney disease — or CKD — that is killing thousands of sugarcane workers and other manual laborers in Central America.

The Costa Rica study will seek to answer one of the thorniest and most politically sensitive questions surrounding what regional health experts call an epidemic: whether the illness should be classified as an occupational disease. Many workers believe the malady is caused by pesticide exposure and working conditions. They have demanded compensation from the sugar industry, which has vehemently denied responsibility.

“The main objective is to test whether CKD is or is not a labor-related exposure,” said Dr. Roy Wong, an epidemiologist with Costa Rica’s national health service and lead investigator for the study.

The cause of the disease’s outbreak remains unknown, although a growing body of research has shown links between declining kidney function and repeated heat stress and dehydration — the result of strenuous labor in hot climates.