Toxoplasma gondii - alkueläimen esiintyvyys suomalaisissa lampaissa

Lisensiaatin tutkielma koostuu kirjallisuuskatsauksesta, jossa käsitellään Toxoplasma gondii – alkueläintä ja sen vaikutusta lampaisiin ja ihmisiin sekä kokeellisesta osasta, jossa tutkittiin T. gondii – alkueläin vasta-aineiden esiintyvyyttä lampailla Suomessa. T. gondii on laajalle levinnyt zoonoottinen alkueläin, jonka pääisäntänä toimivat kissaeläimet ja väli-isäntinä lähes kaikki tasalämpöiset eläimet. T. gondii voi aiheuttaa vakavia seurauksia mm. lampaalle sekä ihmiselle. Toksoplasmoosi aiheuttaa lampaalle ohimenevän kuumeen sekä mahdollisesti abortointeja ja sikiökuolemia, mikäli tartunta on saatu tiineyden aikana. T. gondii – alkueläimen aiheuttamat infektiot ovat hyvin yleisiä ihmisillä, mutta kliininen tauti rajoittuu suurilta osin riskiryhmiin. Raskauden aikana saatu toksoplasmoosi voi aiheuttaa sikiövaurioita myös ihmisellä. T. gondii - alkueläimellä infektoitunut lampaanliha on eräs mahdollinen lähde ihmisten tartunnoille. Euroopan elintarviketurvallisuusviranomainen, EFSA, suosittelee, että loista tulisi alkaa monitoroida lampailla, kun sopivat serologiset menetelmät ovat saatavilla. T. gondii - alkueläimen esiintyvyydestä lampailla Suomessa ei ole aiempaa tietoa, mutta sen oletettiin olevan samankaltainen kuin muissa Pohjoismaissa. Ruotsissa alkueläintä löytyy 19 % lampaista ja Norjassa 16 %. T. gondii – alkueläimen esiintyvyys määritettiin tutkimalla 1940 lammasseerumia kaupallisella suoralla agglutinaatiotestillä (Toxo-Screen DA). Näytteet ovat kerätty ympäri Suomea 97 tilalta ja jokaiselta tilalta tutkittiin 20 näytettä. Käytetty testi havaitsee IgG- luokan T. gondii vasta-aineet seeruminäytteestä agglutinaation avulla. T. gondii – vasta-aineita löytyi maan laajuisesti 477 lampaalta 1940 tutkitusta eli seroprevalenssi on 24,6 %. Tuloksen 95 %:n luottamusväli on 22,7% – 26,5%. Matalin esiintyvyys alkueläimellä oli Lapin läänissä ja korkein Ahvenanmaalla. Seroprevalenssitulos on oletettua suuruusluokkaa. Tutkituista tiloista 76 %:lla löytyi ainakin yksi lammas, jolta havaittiin vasta-aineita loista vastaan. Suhteellisesti eniten tiloja, jossa oli ainakin yksi seropositiivinen lammas, oli Itä-Suomen läänissä ja vähiten Lapin läänissä. Tutkimuksessa tutkittiin vain yli vuoden ikäisiä lampaita, joten karitsojen T. gondii - vasta-aineiden esiintyvyydestä ei saatu tietoa. Se on yleensä aikuisia lampaita matalampi. Tutkimuksen tulokset osoittavat, että T. gondii – alkueläintartuntoja esiintyy Suomessa lampailla ja että lampaat altistuvat T. gondii – alkueläimelle varsinkin eteläisimmissä osissa Suomea. Suomalainen lampaan liha on potentiaalinen tartunnan lähde ihmisten T. gondii – infektioille, mikäli lihaa ei käsitellä tavoilla, jotka tuhoavat loisen, esimerkiksi riittävällä kuumennuksella tai pakastamalla.

Holographic Superfluids and Solitons

Superfluidity is perhaps one of the most remarkable observed macroscopic quantum effect. Superfluidity appears when a macroscopic number of particles occupies a single quantum state. Using modern experimental techniques one dark solitons) and vortices. There is a large literature on theoretical work studying the properties of such solitons using semiclassical methods. This thesis describes an alternative method for the study of superfluid solitons. The method used here is a holographic duality between a class of quantum field theories and gravitational theories. The classical limit of the gravitational system maps into a strong coupling limit of the quantum field theory. We use a holographic model of superfluidity to study solitons in these systems. One particularly appealing feature of this technique is that it allows us to take into account finite temperature effects in a large range of temperatures.

Vapaussodan perintö : Valkoisuus paikallisyhteisössä sisältö, ylläpitäjät ja rapautuminen Iisalmessa 1918 1933

Legacy of the Finnish Civil War. White nationalism in a local community - content, supporters and disintegration in Iisalmi 1918 - 1933. Using one local community (Iisalmi) as an example, this study centres around the winners of the 1918 Finnish Civil War, exploring their collectivity its subsequent breakdown during 1918 - 1933. Referring to this collectivity by the methodological concept of white nationalism, the thesis first discusses its origin, content and forms. This is done by elucidating the discourses and symbols that came to constitute central ideological and ritualistic elements of white nationalism. Next, the thesis describes and analyzes fundamental actors of the Finnish civil society (such as White Guard and Lotta Svärd) that maintained white nationalism as a form of counter or parallel hegemony to the integration policy of the 1920s. Also highlighted is the significance of white nationalism as a power broker and an instrument of moral regulation in inter-war Finnish society. A third contribution of this thesis involves presenting a new interpretation of the legacy of the Civil War, i.e., the right-wing radicalism during the years 1919 - 1933. I shall describe attempts of the extreme right (Lapua Movement and IKL, Patriotic People s Movement) to use the white nationalism discourse as a vehicle for their political ambitions, as well as the strong counter-reaction these attempts induced among other middle-class groups. At the core of this research is the concept of white nationalism, whose key elements were the sacrifice of 1918, fatherland under threat and warrior citizenship. Winners of the civil war strove to blend these ideals into a homogenized culture, to which the working class and wavering members of the middle-class were coaxed and pressurized to subscribe. The thesis draws on Anglo-American symbol theories, theory of social identity groups, Antonio Gramsci s concept of cultural hegemony and Stuart Hall s approach to discourse and power.

Playing Games on Sets and Models

The most prominent objective of the thesis is the development of the generalized descriptive set theory, as we call it. There, we study the space of all functions from a fixed uncountable cardinal to itself, or to a finite set of size two. These correspond to generalized notions of the universal Baire space (functions from natural numbers to themselves with the product topology) and the Cantor space (functions from natural numbers to the {0,1}-set) respectively. We generalize the notion of Borel sets in three different ways and study the corresponding Borel structures with the aims of generalizing classical theorems of descriptive set theory or providing counter examples. In particular we are interested in equivalence relations on these spaces and their Borel reducibility to each other. The last chapter shows, using game-theoretic techniques, that the order of Borel equivalence relations under Borel reduciblity has very high complexity. The techniques in the above described set theoretical side of the thesis include forcing, general topological notions such as meager sets and combinatorial games of infinite length. By coding uncountable models to functions, we are able to apply the understanding of the generalized descriptive set theory to the model theory of uncountable models. The links between the theorems of model theory (including Shelah's classification theory) and the theorems in pure set theory are provided using game theoretic techniques from Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé games in model theory to cub-games in set theory. The bottom line of the research declairs that the descriptive (set theoretic) complexity of an isomorphism relation of a first-order definable model class goes in synch with the stability theoretical complexity of the corresponding first-order theory. The first chapter of the thesis has slightly different focus and is purely concerned with a certain modification of the well known Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé games. There we (me and my supervisor Tapani Hyttinen) answer some natural questions about that game mainly concerning determinacy and its relation to the standard EF-game

A maximal operator, Carleson's embedding, and tent spaces for vector-valued functions

This thesis is concerned with the area of vector-valued Harmonic Analysis, where the central theme is to determine how results from classical Harmonic Analysis generalize to functions with values in an infinite dimensional Banach space. The work consists of three articles and an introduction. The first article studies the Rademacher maximal function that was originally defined by T. Hytönen, A. McIntosh and P. Portal in 2008 in order to prove a vector-valued version of Carleson's embedding theorem. The boundedness of the corresponding maximal operator on Lebesgue-(Bochner) -spaces defines the RMF-property of the range space. It is shown that the RMF-property is equivalent to a weak type inequality, which does not depend for instance on the integrability exponent, hence providing more flexibility for the RMF-property. The second article, which is written in collaboration with T. Hytönen, studies a vector-valued Carleson's embedding theorem with respect to filtrations. An earlier proof of the dyadic version assumed that the range space satisfies a certain geometric type condition, which this article shows to be also necessary. The third article deals with a vector-valued generalizations of tent spaces, originally defined by R. R. Coifman, Y. Meyer and E. M. Stein in the 80's, and concerns especially the ones related to square functions. A natural assumption on the range space is then the UMD-property. The main result is an atomic decomposition for tent spaces with integrability exponent one. In order to suit the stochastic integrals appearing in the vector-valued formulation, the proof is based on a geometric lemma for cones and differs essentially from the classical proof. Vector-valued tent spaces have also found applications in functional calculi for bisectorial operators. In the introduction these three themes come together when studying paraproduct operators for vector-valued functions. The Rademacher maximal function and Carleson's embedding theorem were applied already by Hytönen, McIntosh and Portal in order to prove boundedness for the dyadic paraproduct operator on Lebesgue-Bochner -spaces assuming that the range space satisfies both UMD- and RMF-properties. Whether UMD implies RMF is thus an interesting question. Tent spaces, on the other hand, provide a method to study continuous time paraproduct operators, although the RMF-property is not yet understood in the framework of tent spaces.

Kansan raittiudeksi ja kotien onneksi : Naisten kieltolakimielipiteet ja toiminta kieltolain puolesta ja sitä vastaan 1919 - 1932

It is often maintained that the Prohibition Act (in force from 1 June 1919 to 5 April 1932) still influences both the Finnish alcohol policy and notions about alcohol. This study focuses on the development of women s opinions concerning Prohibition in Finland. What role did the formulation and expression of women s opinions and women's actions play in the final outcome of the Prohibition Act? What do the debate on Prohibition and women s activities for and against the legislation tell us about the status and possibilities of women to exert influence in the Finnish society of the Prohibition era? Women s opinions are particularly interesting since they deviated radically from what has generally been assumed. It was expected that the referendum of 1931 would result in a resounding vote of 100% in favour of Prohibition, but the outcome was a majority vote against it. Over 65% of the women who cast their vote in the referendum wanted a full repeal of Prohibition. The study approaches the history of Prohibition by combining methods and theories of the history of mentalities and social history with gender history. Women are examined as a heterogeneous group with dissimilar objectives and differing ways of acting and thinking. The research material consists of press materials, archival materials from organisations, personal materials and statistics from the Prohibition period. Both discourses and practices are examined; the object of the research is best described by Michel Foucault's concept of dispositif. When participating in the public debate on Prohibition, women based their right to express their opinions and take part in action on an ideological continuum spanning a hundred years, according to which home and family were central areas of women s interest. This idea was linked to questions of morality and social policy. On the other hand, women presented themselves as working taxpayers, voters and equal citizens. The most crucial issue in women's discussions was whether Prohibition improved or worsened the temperance of fathers, husbands and sons. The dichotomies town dweller - countryside dweller, Swedish-speaking Finnish-speaking, and middle class - working class were highly significant backgrounds both as factors dividing women and in public discussions regarding Prohibition. The 1931 referendum showed that the lines of demarcation drawn during the preceding debate did not materialise in political action in line with these dichotomies: the dispositif did not correspond to the discourse. Contrary to what was expressed in public, a great number of women among the labour and rural classes, among inland inhabitants and among Finnish-speakers were also against Prohibition. The media and organisations defended temperance and Prohibition almost until the end of the Prohibition era. This discourse was in conflict with the discourse of everyday conversations and practices in which alcohol was present.