Malaria is a disease that has been around for thousands of years and has often escaped our efforts to really suppress it. I think we've never before been as successful as we have been over the last couple of years to drive down malaria. I mentioned earlier in the lunch discussion that a country like Vietnam has seen a reduction of 99% of malaria deaths. That is a country where malaria was very important for military reasons when there was the Vietnam War and it was a heavily infected country.
I think the efforts to develop appropriate medication, but also diagnostic tools, have been going on for many years. At the moment we are using what is called artemisinin-based combination therapy. That's the standard treatment for malaria. It's very good. It's based on a plant and has actually been used in Chinese medicine for 2,000 years. It's the most potent drug we have right now. It works very well. It is cheap, and we can basically cure malaria within four days. What we are watching is that there is some increasing resistance to that. Therefore the research community is very eagerly working on alternatives to the current artemisinin product. I'm moderately confident that this will work. So, at the moment we have a very good tool. We also have new diagnostic tools that are very effective. You know, malaria diagnosis was very difficult for many years, using microscopy. Now we have a rapid serological test.
There have been innovations in my area, by the way, in TB and HIV as well. We need these innovations all the time on diagnostics and on treatment if we want to achieve our goals. I think, also, the commitment of the international community to the creation of a Global Fund has provided these incentives for industry to invest in research. We've seen much more research and new products coming on board over the last couple of years, not because we pay for the research but because they anticipate that there is a market now for these products, and they are right. So, it's a more healthy pipeline, let's say, of new products that are coming onto the market. However, it's always a race against time, particularly in terms of the growing resistance.