What we used to call "international health" (suggesting something that went on "over there") has now been renamed and reenergized as "global health." Travel communications and the resurgent power of microorganisms make the health of populations in Asia or Africa mainline concerns in the United States. Both epidemiology and humanitarianism argue for a global view of world health. In her essay tropical medicine specialist Claire Panosian Dunavan discusses the path that led the United States to this new level of awareness about the importance of world health and the realization that as she puts it "the health of others touches all of us-eventually." Twenty-first-century America is the beneficiary of growing numbers of immigrants and their children many of whom are health workers. Aisha Saad came to the United States from Egypt as a child and is now majoring in environmental health science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her experiences on returning to Cairo for a summer to work in a public hospital give her a new view of global health-and her role in it. (authors)