Can you call Swine Flu just swine?

Answer 1

Some people do but it is incorrect. Swine simply means pig/hog. The flu, Swine Flu, is called that because it started as a virus that only infected pigs, so it was the flu that the swine got. Since viruses mutate easily, it changed into a virus that caused flu in people as well as pigs. The name Swine Flu stuck then and also now with the virus causing the pandemic which is actually a third strain of the swine flu virus that people pass to people.

Answer 2

It is confusing since there is the "Swine Flu" that is the virus that pigs get, which is also called Pig Flu and Hog Flu. That is the original H1N1 virus that infected pigs but not people. In 1976, another strain of flu infected people and was called "Swine Flu" which was also an H1N1 virus but different from the first one.

When the pandemic flu was first found and typed to the H1N1 virus, it too, was called "Swine Flu". To avoid confusion with the other two strains, it was called the "2009 Swine Flu". That might have avoided the confusion, but the pork producers and pig farmers didn't like the name "swine" associated again with a potentially bad infection. So they objected to the stigma that was being produced by calling this epidemic flu in 2009 "Swine Flu" again.

To add more confusion, people were calling it Mexican Flu since the first identified cases were in Mexico. This was a more standard way of naming influenza viruses, such as "Asian Flu", "Hong Kong Flu", "Spanish Flu", etc. However, even those namings were not consistent with where the flu was first discovered. And the Mexican government wasn't very happy that it was being called Mexican, either. So the CDC started calling it "Novel H1N1" to mean "New H1N1" flu. This seemed to solve the problems with the stigma.

That is the reason that calling it the swine flu has been discouraged. The World Health Organization (WHO) for the same reasons started calling it the Pandemic Swine Flu.
The latest name they have tried to consistently use is Influenza A-H1N1/09. The 09 was to represent 2009, the year this strain first was discovered. Other countries have different names still. See the related questions below for more information about the name of the 2009 Pandemic influenza.