But that's all nonsense – even though her father Mitch spent the weekend telling anyone who'll listen that Amy Winehouse has been struck down with emphysema, it actually turns out that Amy hasn't so much got emphysema as might get it one day in the future if she doesn't stop smoking – something that could probably be said for all smokers everywhere.

Curses! Now our Amy Winehouse Disease Bingo card is all messed up. Quickly, we'll need a bucket of monkeypox and a dirt-resistant syringe. Stat!

We know it's half a year away, but we're going to save up and get Mitch Winehouse some celebrity parenting lessons for Christmas. Lord knows he needs the help.

Take Dina Lohan or Joe Simpson – they know that the way to get your daughter to the top of the pile is to mercilessly promote them to within an inch of their lives, to blame the media for every single one of their failings and to occasionally tell the world how delicious their boobies look. Mitch Winehouse does the exact opposite of this.

You see, whenever some weird new fate befalls Amy Winehouse, it's always Mitch who winds up blabbing to the press first. And not with standard-issue denials, either – Mitch somehow usually manages to sneak in a reference or two about how utterly effed Amy is. For example, not so long ago Mitch wanted Amy Winehouse to go to a mental hospital – which is obviously either a giant overreaction or something any parent would do upon learning that their child had deliberately befriended Pete Doherty.

And then there's the emphysema. Yesterday everyone was all 'oh no, Amy Winehouse has got emphysema ' thanks to a frantic, dry-mouthed interview about oxygen masks and 70% lung capacity that Mitch Winehouse gave to the Sunday Mirror this weekend. Now, however, it's a completely different story.

Turns out that Amy Winehouse doesn't have emphysema after all – she's got the easily-reversible first traces of something that could potentially lead to something like emphysema. The sniffles, basically. E! Online has more:

The singer's rep is saying that the 24-year-old Brit does not have emphysema, as her father told Britain's Sunday Mirror over the weekend. Rather, she has "early signs of what could lead to emphysema," rep Tracey Miller said Monday. "Amy really hasn't got emphysema" … Mitch told BBC Radio 1 today.

Thank heavens for that – for all of Amy Winehouse's tabloid notoriety, it'd be tragic to think that one of this country's brightest musical talents could no longer perform because she suffered from a degenerative lung disease. Not being able to perform because she's constantly spazzed off her chump on weapons-grade narcotics is fine, but not lung disease. Heavens, no.

That's right – it appears that hoofing down crack and cigarettes all the time like a stinky old tramp hasn't done Amy Winehouse's lungs any good at all. According to her dad Mitch, in fact, Amy Winehouse has been diagnosed with the early stages of emphysema – a disease that'll kill her if she doesn't quit drugs immediately.

Now, obviously this isn't news because it's been discovered that Amy Winehouse is close to death – any fool has been able to see that for the last year or so – but because her contraction of emphysema has helped us complete our Amy Winehouse Disease Bingo card! Hooray! Now we just have to decide whether we go double or quits with weaponised Marburg. She doesn't already have that, does she?

Amy Winehouse is like a walking medical encyclopedia, albeit a walking encyclopedia that you don't want to touch in case it gives you headlice or bellows the word 'Blake' at you for an hour and a half until you forget what you wanted from it. Anyway, our point – we think – was that Amy Winehouse knows a lot about disease.

For starters Amy Winehouse's skin is apparently riddled with impetigo, plus she once contracted the rare disorder of taking too many drugs and almost dying – and now it's her lungs that are all effed up.

You see, Amy Winehouse's father has told the world that his daughter has emphysema. It's a cruel illness, striking down any number of people, so long as they're elderly soap opera actresses who smoke an irresponsible amount of cigarettes during their lifetime. And Amy Winehouse, too, apparently. BBC News reports:

Mitch Winehouse told the Sunday Mirror his daughter has early stage emphysema and an irregular heartbeat. "Doctors have told her if she goes back to smoking drugs, it won't just ruin her voice, it will kill her," he said. "With smoking the crack cocaine and the cigarettes her lungs are all gunked up. There are nodules around the chest and dark marks. She's got 70% lung capacity."

That's actually quite serious-sounding. Still, hopefully the early diagnosis combined with her father's insistence on repeatedly humiliating her in public will force Amy Winehouse to dramatically change her ways before it's too late. After all, if we can say anything about Amy Winehouse it's that she always learns from her mistakes.

Wait, no, what we meant to say was that if we can say anything about Amy Winehouse it's that she never learns anything, not even in the face of serious life or death consequences, and she's doomed to repeat the same mistakes time and time again until she inevitably messes her life up beyond repair. Yeah, that scans better.

Anyway, if Amy Winehouse can successfully combat her emphysema now, perhaps she can go on to become a spokesperson for young women who keep catching diseases traditionally reserved for the elderly. After all, just think of the awareness that can be raised for the likes of The Association For Gout-Stricken Teenagers or Incontinence Pants For The Under-25s with a megastar like Amy Winehouse onboard.