The coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak (COVID-19) caused by the SARS-CoV coronavirus, has been declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020, as a result of which about 315,000,000 people all over the world have been infected and more than 5,000,000 died.

Air embolisms are a common entity seen in clinical practice after traumatic or iatrogenic events. Cases of a suicidally induced air embolism are rare. The connectivity of air-carrying and fluid-carrying tubing systems allow large gas volumes to be infused in a short period of time, usually with fatal outcome. In such cases, the use of computed tomography prior to autopsy is mandatory and provides a comprehensive visualization of introduced gas volumes. We present an unusual case of a suicidal gas embolism, in which a man in hospital connected a tube supplying oxygen to a venous catheter.

This article reports the autopsy findings of a 1.5-year-old girl with no history of previous hospital admission who suddenly collapsed at home. After 45 minutes of resuscitation efforts, the cardiac activity was restored. During hospitalization, she had ventricular arrhythmia and extremely elevated cardiac troponin levels. Internal examination and immunohistochemistry revealed cardiac fibromas of the right and left ventricles and extensive hypoxic myocardial damage. The right ventricular fibroma demonstrated interdigitating and entrapped myocardium visible at the edges and within the central portion of the tumor. The left ventricular fibroma originated in the subepicardial region and propagated towards the endocardium.

This article outlines the chronological development of the annual conferences of the German Society of Legal Medicine (DGRM) from 1905 to 2021. The medical and scientific aspects as well as the specific problems of the subject are presented in the context of the respective political and social structures and the conference culture is sketched.

Inadequate quality of medical postmortem examinations has been discussed in the forensic medical literature for many years. It is known that older deceased persons are less likely to have a non-natural cause of death certified and autopsies are performed less frequently compared to younger deceased persons.

Globally, there is talk of excess mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this study is to examine whether this excess mortality is not only caused by fatal disease progression, but also by violent deaths associated with the pandemic.

Since electric scooters were introduced as an urban means of transportation in Hamburg in June 2019, a high number of violations of the current laws regarding alcohol consumption by e‑scooter riders have been recorded.

Since the spread of the so-called electric scooters (e-scooters) through rental services in Hamburg as of June 2019, accidents due to the use of this means of transportation have been regularly registered. The most frequent injury patterns among e‑scooter riders involved accidents concerning the upper extremities and the head. There was a relevant accumulation of drunk drivers among the injured persons.

During the COVID-19 pandemic the third section of the medical examination could be performed on simulation patients and simulators. Their use is also beneficial in forensic medicine, as a higher level of standardization and comparability of examination performance is achieved, and the use of real corpses is often not justifiable for medicolegal reasons. This case reports on the advantages and disadvantages of a simulation in the state examination in which a death certificate was to be completely filled out on the basis of an external postmortem examination on the simulator and an external anamnesis.

During the recent pandemic with the severe acute respiratory syndrome-corona virus‑2 the first messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines were approved. To facilitate mass vaccination, confidence of the general population in these new vaccines is mandatory, which is in turn strongly dependent on the availability of reliable data on complications.

Coronary artery autoimmune vasculitis (Kawasaki syndrome) is at least in Germany a very rare condition, that typically manifests in childhood. The symptoms are often unspecific and complications with vascular aneurysms, thrombosis and myocardial infarction can occur. Multiple cases of Kawasaki-like symptoms in children with positive SARS-CoV‑2 test results have been reported during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic the past year.This case study reports on a 2-year-old child who had fever over 6 days and after a temporary improvement, died within 1 day (pre-COVID19 era).The autopsy showed autoimmune vasculitis of the right and left main coronary artery consistent with Kawasaki syndrome with aneurysm formation, acute thrombosis and myocardial infarction.In the case of macroscopically conspicuous dilated and/or thrombosed coronary arteries and/or myocardial infarction in children, a Kawasaki syndrome should be excluded in addition to other differential diagnoses.

On the occasion of a judicial expert opinion on the question of whether wearing a face mask can lead to a falsification of the breath alcohol value leading to detriment of the accused, an experimental series of tests was carried out under pandemic conditions on six healthy test subjects (four men, two women), who practiced low-risk recreational alcohol consumption. On each day of the study one specific mask type (surgical mask, textile mask, FFP2 mask) was examined. After ingestion of an individually calculated amount of alcohol and a 30-min absorption phase, 6 consecutive breath alcohol measurements were carried out at 30-min intervals, with one mask or no mask worn between measurements. Subsequently, pairs of values for periods with and without a mask were formed and the hourly breath alcohol elimination rates were calculated. As a result, the breath alcohol elimination rates with and without masks did not differ from each other. There were no error messages from the breathalyzer that can be attributed to the previous wearing of a mask.