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Transcript: S. Kalani Brady, M.D.

Most people are immune to Hansen’s disease

[Lindberg:]
How many medical attendants and nurses and doctors and priests and ministers on this island ever got leprosy?
[Brady:]
Oh, Father Damien. And I’ve heard one other health care provider in Kalaupapa in the 160-year history of the settlement.
[Lindberg:]
So it’s actually an amazingly incommunicable disease.
[Brady:]
Absolutely. Very hard to get. As a matter of fact most of us are immune to Hansen’s our entire lives. Some of us have a cellular immune deficiency that makes us susceptible—three to five percent of the population only.