There’s no end to Michael Jackson’s talents – he can sing, dance, act and transform into a giant plasticine rabbit to elude his fans.

But there’s one thing that Michael Jackson can’t do particularly well at the moment, and that’s breathe. According to one of his biographers, Michael Jackson suffers from a potentially fatal lung disorder that requires an emergency transplant before it kills or blinds him.

Hopefully that’s not true because, if he has his lungs replaced, the only parts of Michael Jackson to actually belong to Michael Jackson will be three strands of armpit hair and a fragment of toenail.

Ever since he was acquitted of child abuse, we’ve been inundated with stories about Michael Jackson’s comeback, but they’ve never materialised. The charity singles have never been made, the O2 residency never happened, nor did the Las Vegas revue, the Jackson 5 reunion, the collaboration with 50 Cent or the album of duets with the dead Pope.

And all the while Michael’s financial woes piled up against him until he lost his beloved Neverland and got sued silly by an angry sheikh. The sensible thing for Michael Jackson to do to recoup his losses would have been to either release a new album or go on tour to bang out the old hits to hundreds of thousands of adoring fans. But he never did. And now it looks like we know why.

According to some reports, Michael Jackson’s extended period of inactivity isn’t down to stagefright or the unshakable sense that, three bars into Smooth Criminal, someone’s going to chuck a bottle of piss at him and call him a nonce – it’s all because of that pesky Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency – a genetic lung disorder that might very well kill him if he isn’t given a transplant as soon as possible.

That’s the claim by Michael Jackson biographer Ian Halperin, anyway, who also insists that Michael Jackson can barely speak and has lost 95% of his vision in his left eye. OK! reports:

Halperin claims his lung condition has become more acute. The writer added: “He has had Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency for years but it’s gotten worse. He needs a lung transplant but may be too weak to go through with it. He also has emphysema and chronic gastrointestinal bleeding, which his doctors have had a lot of trouble stopping. It’s the bleeding that’s the most problematic part. It could kill him.”

If these claims hold any water, then it’s a horrible irony – the very thing that has earnt Michael Jackson his fortune over the last 40 years is being taken away from him by his own genes. Why did it have to be the one thing he was good at? Why couldn’t he have developed a degenerative protein deficiency on a part of his body that he didn’t need, like his hair or whichever part of his brain it is that makes him act so funny around kids? Why?

Still, though, let’s hope that Michael Jackson can get this lung transplant if that’s what will save his life. God knows his children are going to be messed up enough as it is without a dead dad to worry about.

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