"Robert Green" wrote
"A. Baum" wrote

stuff snipped

"Juicy" young people can apparently
generate enough phlegm to drown themselves in it. Dried up older
people
like me and Willie Nelson (who claims to have "outlived his dick")
can't
produce nearly as much phlegm as so can't produce the prodigious
amounts
of it that clog the lungs and helps cause death.

Somewhat true but most elderly who die from the flue die from
complications like congestive heart failure. Especially those who
already have compromised heart output. Or they die from organ shutdown.
A cascading failure of heart, kidney, liver and eventually succumb to
asphyxiation of the brain due to inadequate blood supply and under-
oxygenated blood. Flu hits the young and elderly in most cases the
hardest.

You raise an interesting point. Since the number of autosopies performed
each year has been dropping steadily (except for judicially ordered ones)
we
have less and less meaningful data about the actual causes of death.

(Responding to my own post to point out there's a documentary how just how
bad things are regarding the state of the nation's coroners. Tonight PBS
will be broadcasting Post Mortem, a film that illuminates the egregious
lapses in the American system of death investigation. It highlights the
widespread incompetence of poorly trained coroners and the failure of local
governments to pay sufficient attention to the need for sound forensic
pathology - "It's not the way they portray it on CSI!" - and it shows how
poorly spent our health care dollars are - we claim to know what the biggest
medical "killers" are, but there's really very little accurate information
to back up any of the claims made by various advocacy groups.)

--
Bobby G.