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Purpose: To investigate self-reported work ability in patients with musculoskeletal disorders in physiotherapy treatment. What characterizes patients with reduced work ability, whether work ability changes during treatment and characteristics of patients reporting no improvement. Design: Cohort study Material: 1498 patients with musculoskeletal disorders of working age who attend physiotherapy in primary healthcare. Method: Questionnaires at baseline and after three months. Results: 63% reported reduced work ability at baseline. Factors associated with reduced work ability were reduced daily activity level, physical work, psychological complaints, widespread pain, and high pain intensity. Participants with reduced work ability improved their average work ability by 1.7 on the WAS (work ability scale 0-10), however 53% did not achieve improvement. Characteristics of patients without improvement in work ability were long-term complaints, widespread pain, and psychological complaints. Conclusion: It seems difficult to improve work ability for patients with long-term and complex disorders in physiotherapy treatment. Physiotherapists should pay particular attention to psychological factors that inhibit improvement in work ability.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Sweden accelerated the hybridisation of welfare, as volunteer organisations underwent rapid processes of professionalization and assumed growing responsibilities for the distribution of welfare services. A sense of urgency prompted by terrifying horror scenarios spread in the media and helped motivate politicians and fund-giving agencies to channel large amounts of money into volunteer organisations like RFSL (the National Union for Sexual Equality), RFSU (the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education) and Noaks Ark, as well as to the various self-help groups that emerged for HIV-positive men who had sex with men, drug users, haemophiliacs, and, to a lesser degree, sex workers. The article focus on how these volunteer organisations – old and new – interacted with the state and the public health sector, how they interacted – and came into conflict – with each other, and how the membership-oriented activities changed over time due to professionalisation and to the introduction of anti-retroviral drugs in 1996.

• For the first time student responses to science questions from the Swedish PISA 2006 Main Study and the PISA 2015 Field Trial have been used in order to investigate differences in boys’ and girls’ written responses. Students’ correct and incorrect answers to the science questions are studied with respect to response length, the number of everyday words used, and the inclusion of nouns and long words in the responses. The results reveal that girls give longer and denser correct responses to most of the questions, compared to boys. The difference in response length cannot be explained by girls’ excessive use of the most common Swedish words, since boys and girls use the same proportion of these words. For incorrect answers the only difference between boys and girls is in the response length, since girls give longer answers than boys.

The article discusses the argument from foetal defects as a reason for legal abortion in 20th century Sweden. Women in Sweden got limited access to abortion in 1938 under certain circumstances – for medical reasons (if the woman’s life or health was in jeopardy), humanitarian reasons (to terminate pregnancies resulting from incest or rape) or eugenic reasons (if the woman or her partner was a carrier of a serious hereditary disease). In 1946 abortion for socio-medical reasons were legalised, and in 1963, the law was amended so as to include abortion in cases of foetal defects. Abortion on demand was introduced in 1975. Three different examples are discussed: abortion on eugenic grounds for women diagnosed as feeble-minded in the 1940s, abortions performed due to the rubella epidemic in the 1950s, and abortions permitted to women who had taken thalidomide (in Sweden sold under the name ”neurosedyn”) in the early 1960s. In focus are the during the period changing ideas regarding disability and women’s rights and their role in society, and how disabled children and women wanting abortions were represented in the media. Eugenic abortions were essentially performed to prevent the procreation of persons classified as deficient. While eugenic abortions were seen as uncontroversial at the time, abortions for other reasons, such as rubella, caused some controversy among physicians. The public debate on the thalidomide events, and in particular the American Sherri Finkbine’s widely reported abortion in Sweden in 1962 as well as the Belgian Suzanne Vandeput’s killing of her child in the same year, paved the way for a revised abortion law and a greater acceptance for women wanting abortions.