Among the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) adopted nine years ago, it is clear that health was and still is the major priority and the aim in which developing and developed nations have to focus. According to the 2009 Millennium Development Goals Report, there are still some areas which have to be covered: hunger in the youngest citizens; education and especially education on health aspects (i.e. prevention and health promotion); maternal mortality in specific oriental regions; improvement of sanitation to 1.4 billion people who still live in unhealthy conditions; improvement of preservation of natural resource bases.

In this context, there are two types of actions that the US can follow in order to accomplish this objective: the ones that should maintain and the ones that should develop.

Among the actions that the US should maintain and improve, there is the necessity to follow the example of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute intention to create and maintain a worldwide network of research and training centers, but for the other major causes of death, like infectious diseases, mental health diseases (a group of problems which nowadays causes an important number of morbi-mortality, according to my experience working at the Mental Health Research Group at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, UPCH) and road accidents. The creation of these parallel systems for each of the important groups of health problems around the world, will allow us to build institutional and community capacity to prevent, and most important, to control all chronic and non-chronic conditions. Special topics that should be included in this kind of network systems are Tuberculosis, Tobacco and Mental Diseases among health workers, which are specific public health problems that I had the experience to review for local public health campaigns when I worked as the National Public Health Officer in IFMSA-Perú (national organization recognized by the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations - IFMSA)

Among the second type of actions, I must say that there are programs in the US like the Child Family Health International, which aims to share a variety of aspects between health professionals and rural communities around the world. I do have the opportunity to participate – and to organize – in this kind of programs but within my country, Peru (where economic, social and health contrasts are not rare between different regions), through the IRIS Project (IFMSA Rex Crossley Award 2009 winner) and I am convinced that this is very useful system by which both parts, health professionals and rural inhabitants learn from each other. The US in this context should be open to finance the program mentioned or other similar to that, in order to include more people from more corners of the world in this type of enriching experience.

Other important aspect is the one that has to do with scientific research. Health professionals from developing countries who are doing post-graduate studies in Europe and the US are returning to their native countries (with salary paid by their research centers) for a period of a year or two, in order to dedicate full-time to do scientific research on topics relevant to these last ones. The US should try to promote this kind of exercise, especially with professionals who came from research groups/centers which are known to have important contributes to the health scientific knowledge, like for example professionals from the UPCH, in Lima (Perú).

My experience in designing a protocol for a systematic review, tacking an important public health problem in neonates with infections, have shown me that there is the necessity to promote the production of this type of research because there is the need to summarize hundreds of primary studies done in the past decades. The US, through the work of the Cochrane Group, should promote this intention in a massive way so that systematic reviews could become something common, especially for health workers. Finally, I must say that when I was taught – during a workshop I took called Basic Concepts in Global Health in UPCH – that there was a time in which the concept of international health turned into global health, one possible explanation was that the WHO created it in order to refashion itself in response to an international political crisis. However, the US, as one of the world powers nowadays, should revive the concept of global health among all the other world powers, but in terms of a ‘global’ concern; the US should help the WHO to spread the message worldwide that every citizen from every country must be involved in the restoration of the global public health, which must be understood as the largest amount of improvement on health that can be done, with the guarantee that all people around the world will be benefited and none of them could be damaged at all.