Contribución metodológica a la epidemiologia y vigilancia genómica tropical: Desde las macrohabilidades del inglés

In the last two decades, there has been a commitment of political will and financial resources for the reduction of neglected tropical diseases. NTDs affect approximately 1 billion people, the majority of whom are poor. In the case of many of these tropical diseases, efforts have focused on expanding treatment coverage through mass drug administration. The disappointing reality is that in all geographic regions, some diseases persist. This has led the WHO to call for breakthroughs and new tools to accelerate progress in reducing the substantial burden such as genomics. Genomic surveillance is commonly employed as an important tool to understand the sources of outbreaks of viral and bacterial infections. However, despite the great advances in genomics, many medical students are not familiar with the appropriate terms, basically due to their low command of English, which is the language that dominates the scientific field. To learn about this reality, a diagnostic test was applied to Spanish-speaking students in the areas of medical sciences with the aim of estimating the students' ability to understand, dexterity or macro-skills in English in the context of epidemiology and tropical genomic surveillance. The results show that students have reading ability from good to excellent in more than 70% of the population studied, in contrast, the lowest domain is writing ability with 41.176% at a low-regular level.