Battles for Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant have been going on for nearly two months — Russian troops have been trying to seize this final pocket of Ukrainian resistance since mid-March. Russian President Vladimir Putin called off plans for the Russian military to storm the plant in late April, but Azovstal’s defenders regularly report renewed shelling and assaults. On May 7, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced that “all” civilians had been evacuated from the besieged steel plant. The next day, soldiers from the Azov regiment, which is defending Azovstal, said in a press briefing that they too needed to be evacuated, because they had used up all of the resources they had for waging an “effective defense.” On Tuesday, May 10, the Azov regiment published photos of their wounded soldiers and urged “the entire civilized world” to help with their evacuation. “The world should see the conditions in which the wounded, mutilated defenders of Mariupol are [living] and act,” the accompanying statement said. Meduza shares these photos here....

A pig virus may have contributed to the death of a man who received a groundbreaking transplant using a pig heart, according to news reports.

The man, 57-year-old David Bennett Sr., died on March 8, two months after his pig-heart transplant surgery. The heart used in the transplant was from a pig that had been genetically modified to make its heart more acceptable to a human immune system.

Cardiac surgery: Today, the greatest interest in the techniques of acid-base management lies in the psycho-neurological outcome after bypass and in the resulting quality of life of the patient. The acid-base management during hypothermia is of paramount importance for medical specialists conducting extracorporeal circulation or performing cardiopulmonary bypass. Maintenance of the internal environment/homeostasis is vital, no less important than respiration or circulation, Prof. Dr. Ervin Severdija emphasizes.

C-reactive protein (CRP) has been shown to increase dramatically during COVID-19 progression and correlates with deleterious outcomes. Selective CRP apheresis can reduce circulating CRP levels fast and effective, Fabrizio Esposito, Harald Matthes and Friedemann Schad report in Journal of Clinical Medicine.