HAART

History

As HAART became widespread, fixed dose combinations were made available to ease the administration. Later, the term combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) gained favor with some physicians as a more accurate name, not conveying to patients any misguided idea of the nature of the therapy. Today multidrug, highly effective regimens are long since the default in ART, which is why they are increasingly called simply ART instead of HAART or cART. This retronymic process is linguistically comparable to the way that the words electronic computer and digital computer at first were needed to make useful distinctions in computing technology, but with the later irrelevance of the distinction, computer alone now covers their meaning. Thus as "all computers are digital now", so "all ART is combination ART now." However, the names HAART and cART, reinforced by thousands of earlier mentions in medical literature still being regularly cited, also remain in use. In 1997, the new number of new HIV/AIDS cases in the United States would see its first significant decline at 47%, with credit going to the effectiveness of HAART.