Definition of "swine flu" [swine flu]

• A highly contagious form of human influenza caused by a filterable virus identical or related to a virus formerly isolated from infected swine. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The cases of GBS that resulted from the swine flu vaccine were no different, in terms of the severity of paralysis and weakness, from those that had emerged in nonvaccinated individuals, except for the fact that those who developed GBS without having been vaccinated were, as in my own case, far more likely to have had an acute illness in the month preceding GBS."
• "The influenza A/New Jersey swine flu vaccine and Guillain-Barré syndrome: The arguments for a causal association."
• "Epidemiologists wondered if the cause of so many people developing GBS after getting the swine flu vaccine might have been a residual protein taken from the myelin of embryonic chicks that existed in the vaccine through all its manufacturing stages, though the idea that this myelin protein had caused a case of molecular mimicry was a guess at best."