PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS. It is important to start the planning process from an informed perspective, both in terms of the country in which the program will be implemented and the lessons learnt from other countries. The core practical considerations for establishing a new HIVST program include understanding the regulatory framework (or lack of one) with respect to medical devices, understanding the processes and impediments for getting the selected products into the country, and confidence that it will be possible to provide a safe, effective and reliable delivery system. For any country where HIVST has not previously been available, it may be necessary to undertake program evaluations to study the prospective acceptability of the testing approach, preferences of potential clients, language and cultural issues that could affect the success of the program, and studies to ascertain whether an HIVST program could achieve the intended health goals. Much work has been done to answer some core programmatic implementation questions and understand the factors that determine its overall impact. For example, modelling and investment scenarios developed as part of STAR demonstrated that the impact and cost-effectiveness of HIVST is sensitive to the prevalence of undiagnosed HIV in the sub-population and the overall costs of service delivery. Studies of data from Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe showed that the greatest epidemiological impact can be achieved with the most cost-effective use of scarce resources when HIVST focuses on adult men and when targeted at women having transactional sex. Providers of HIVST testing should put in place quality assurance (QA) mechanisms to ensure that individuals who self-test get a correct diagnosis. Those who self-test HIV positive (reactive) must undergo confirmatory testing using approved algorithm. Distributors of HIVST should ensure that users are provided with information and tools to support effective linkage and referrals to confirmatory testing, treatment and prevention. Recommended models for linkages can be found in the “Implementation” section of this guide. Other key findings from experience to date with HIVST led to the recommendations that in all programs: • Those who receive a reactive (potentially positive) result should be referred to confirmatory testing and, if confirmed, linkage to ART; and, • Those who test negative (non-reactive) should still receive referrals and linkage to HIV prevention, as well as other health information on tubercul...
PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS. 5.2.1 Protocol Unification Although described separately in Section 4, the four STR operations (join, leave, merge and partition) actually represent different strands of a single protocol. We justify this claim with an informal argument below. Obviously, join and leave are special cases of merge and partition, respectively. We observed that merge and partition can be collapsed into a single protocol, since, in either case, the key tree changes and the remaining group members lack some number of bkeys that prevents them from computing the new root key. In a partition, the remaining members (in any surviving group fragment) reconstruct the tree where some bkeys are missing. In case of a merge, let us suppose that k groups (Tree T1 through Tk) are merging. After the first round of the merge protocol, all members reconstruct the new tree unambiguously and independently where all bkeys from the sponsor node up to the root node are missing similar to the partition protocol. The sponsor in merge is located at the topmost leaf node of the highest key tree. As discussed in Sections 4.4 and 4.3, every member reconstructs the key tree after a partition and a merge in one and two rounds, respectively. From these outlines of the merge and partition protocol, we can find some similarities: – Whenever new membership event happens, all current group members first reconstruct the key tree. – The resulting key tree has missing bkeys from the parent node of the sponsor to the root node as well as the sponsor’s blinded session random. – The sponsor generates new session random and computes all keys and bkeys from its parent node up to the node just below the root node. It then broadcasts the whole key tree containing only bkeys and blinded session randoms. – Using the broadcast message, any member can compute the group key. This apparent similarity between partition and merge allows us to combine the protocols stem- ming from all membership events into a single, unified protocol. Figure 4a shows the pseudocode. The incentive for this is threefold. First, unification allows us to simplify the implementation and minimize its size. Second, the overall security and correctness are easier to demonstrate with a single protocol. Third, we can now claim that (with a slight modification) the STR protocol is self-stabilizing and fault-tolerant as discussed below.
PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS. In determining whether you should ask for tenant estoppel certificate(s), factors such as the prospective purchaser’s objective (long-term hold or short-term flip), the size of the building(s), the number of tenants and the lender involved in a purchase may dictate the time devoted to obtaining and reviewing tenant estoppel certificates. With appropriate consideration given to the economics of transactions, counsel for landlords and prospective purchasers will best serve their clients’ interests by obtaining as many tenant estoppel certificates as possible and carefully examining them for accuracy during the appropriate due diligence period so that the possibility of later litigation over material lease terms will be minimized.
PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS. Any decision of the arbitrator shall be binding in any court of law so that the terms of the decision can be enforced.
PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS. Any decision of the arbitrator shall be binding in any court of law so that the terms of the decision can be enforced. Dated: January 22, 2004 Dated: January 22, 2004
