McNabb and Chungong BMC Public Health 2010, 10(Suppl 1):S3 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/10/S1/S3 Page 5 of 7 Figure 2. Relationships and Dependencies among the Eight Keys of Comprehensive Health Protection to Comprehensive Effective and Efficient Global Public Health Surveillance. to universal global access to interoperable public health information when it’s needed, where it’s needed. In the process sense, interoperable and integrated public health information means achieving eﬀective and eﬃcient public health business practices and workﬂow empowered and enabled to be better, faster, and cheaper by IT. Operationally, comprehensive, global public health surveillance means one sign-on access to authorized and necessary public health information. Public health infor- mation includes other information – when combined with health-related information – that provides a picture of population or community health. Consumers should have one-stop shopping for public health information; and there should be one source for integration of public health information for all users. This also means one common set of standards for “bringing together” or interoperating existing or new data streams. Most impor- tantly, one size does not ﬁt all. Demographic, clinical, laboratory and other informa- tion about patients with diseases of public health signiﬁcance should only have to be entered once, saving time and resources. The local, district, national, or international health authorities should be able to access real-time health outcome data and perform analyses or take timely and appropriate public health action based on that information. It should be stressed that keeping electronic health information private, conﬁdential, and secure while automatically and immediately electronically communicating public health information to local public health authorities to satisfy mandatory public health reporting purposes is critical. Diﬀerent reporting systems may be in existence depending on the types of data and information being reported, purpose and urgency of relaying the information, and where the data/information is being reported. This perspective embraces and mitigates the tension between two fundamental human rights. The ﬁrst is the human right to privacy, conﬁdentiality, and security of personal health information. This includes any informa- tion about individuals demonstrated to be related to health (e.g., medical records, laboratory reports, behavioral risk factors, medical examiner and vital records, school records) and the right of sovereign, national entities to the ownership and authority over their citizens’ public health information. The second is the human right of