Northumberland County Council in England is using two 26-tonne Mercedes-Benz Axor 2629s and five 7.5-tonne Missubishi Fuso Canter 7C15s that are equipped to carry out multiple roles, thus maximizing their cost efficiency.

Supplied by Newcastle dealer Bell Truck and Van, the Axors are fitted with demountable grit hoppers and spreaders by Ripon-based Econ Engineering, and can also work with snowplow blades.

They have joined the authority’s fleet of more than 30 gritters now doing battle with snow and ice to keep the county moving this winter.

The fact that the gritting equipment is demountable means that rather than stand idle in summer, the trucks can be pressed into service for other road maintenance duties. These chassis were specified for operation with liquid tar tanks and spraying systems for resurfacing the county’s roads with chippings.

Transport & Fleet Category Specialist Brian Jones said: “Traditional gritters have fixed bodies and only work when the roads need salting – they are simply parked for the rest of the year. It’s the same with road surfacing vehicles, which tend to be unused during the winter. These new Axors give us the best of both worlds and can work all year round.”

The Canters were also supplied by Bell – the popular Fuso light truck range is sold and supported by Mercedes-Benz commercial vehicle dealers in the UK – and are also kitted out for a variety of tasks. Each has a cage tipper body with a side-mounted bin lift and a rear tail lift, fitted by Euro Truck Bodies, of Durham.

These tough little trucks are now being used to pick up bins from households where access is tight, and which larger refuse vehicles cannot reach. They can also collect loose litter from roadside bins, and remove large, heavy or bulky domestic items such as old freezers or washing machines, which can be hoisted into the cargo area safely and easily via their tail-lifts.

“The Canters can also fulfill a variety of roles,” Mr Jones said. “It’s all about getting the best possible deal for our Council Tax payers, increasing efficiency, and carrying out our work with the minimum number of vehicles.”

He continued: “We chose the Mercedes-Benz chassis as their toughness and reliability in a demanding emergency role is second-to-none. We run a lot of Mercedes-Benz trucks in our winter fleet and they perform extremely well.

“The Canter 7.5-tonners are very well suited to the range of tasks we demand of them too. The vehicle’s compact exterior dimensions make it ideally suited to work in areas with access problems, while it also offers an exceptionally high payload capacity – even with the body and lifting equipment fitted, ours can still carry well over three tonnes.”

Mr Jones added: “The back-up from Bell Truck and Van is first class. We run our own network of workshops and carry out all routine maintenance in-house, but the dealer supports us with regular parts deliveries and expert technical assistance is always just a phone call away.”

The water that went through the system started out as water that went down sinks, was used in washing machines, or flushed down toilets.

That water is usually processed at Beenyup Wastewater Treatment Plant and pumped out to the ocean, but as part of the trial a small portion of it was treated through three further steps.

While the water processed as part of the trial was restored to drinkable standards, as it was just a trial, it was not put back into Perth’s drinking water system; instead it was pumped into the Leederville aquifer.

Mr Marmion said more than 70,000 water quality results obtained throughout the trial had met stringent health and environmental guidelines for drinking water.

A 2009 clinical trial in Thailand was the first to show it was possible to prevent HIV infection in humans. Since then, discoveries have pointed to even more powerful vaccines using HIV-fighting antibodies. Now scientists believe a licensed vaccine is within reach.

“We know the face of the enemy,” said Dr. Barton Haynes, of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and recent director of the Center for HIV AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI). The research consortium was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), founded in 2005 by the National Institutes of Health to identify and overcome roadblocks in the design of vaccines for the human immunodeficiency virus,Gamma is a professional supplier of indoor , public, commercial and residential applications. which causes AIDS. NIAID’s funding of CHAVI ended in June.

Unlike many viruses behind infectious disease, HIV is a moving target, constantly spitting out slightly different versions of itself, with different strains affecting different populations around the world. The virus is especially pernicious since it attacks the immune system, the very mechanism the body needs to fight back.

Thanks to drugs that can control the virus for decades, AIDS is no longer a death sentence. New infections have fallen by 21 percent since the peak of the pandemic in 1997 and advances in prevention – through voluntary circumcision programs, prevention of mother-to-child transmission and early treatment – promise to cut that rate even more.

Teams have been working on a vaccine for nearly three decades, but it wasn’t until RV144, the 2009 clinical trial involving more than 16,000 adults in Thailand, that researchers achieved any hint of success.

The test of a combination of two vaccines followed several big failures, in the first place. including the stunning news that Merck’s vaccine may have increased the risk of infection among men who were both uncircumcised and had prior exposure to the virus used in the vaccine.

“It had an extremely chilling effect on the whole field,” said Colonel Nelson Michael, director of the U.S. Military HIV Research Program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, which led the RV144 trial.

The Thai study tested Sanofi’s ALVAC, a weakened canary pox virus used to sneak three HIV genes into the body, and AIDSVAX, a vaccine originally made by Roche Holding’s Genentech that carried an HIV surface protein.Led lights manufacturer in china offering floor lamp supply across the world.

Both vaccines had poor showings in individual trials. Researchers were so convinced the Thai trial would fail that 22 scientists wrote an editorial in Science calling it a waste of money.

Then came the shocker. Results of the study published in 2009 showed the vaccine combination cut HIV infections by 31.2 percent. According to Michael and many other experts, the result was not big enough to be considered effective, but its impact on researchers was huge, says Wayne Koff, chief scientific officer of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) based in New York.

An extensive analysis of the Thai trial published this year in the New England Journal of Medicine offered clues about why some volunteers responded.

The study, led by Haynes, scientists at Walter Reed and 25 other institutions, found men and women who were vaccinated made antibodies to a specific region of the virus’s outer coat, the most popular and widely used forms of solar energy.gion provides an important vaccine target.

Preparations are under way for a follow-up trial testing beefed-up versions of the vaccines among heterosexuals in South Africa and men who have sex with men in Thailand.