It may be the epidemic you haven’t heard about, and it’s hitting especially hard right in Texas.

The disease could someday soon be afflicting far more people than it does today and is already costing Texas taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. What’s in vials at a Houston medical lab has researchers in Houston worried. Very worried.

“We’ll, it’s very scary,” UT Health Science Center’s Dr. Philip Orlander said.

“We should be absolutely panicked,” Craig Hanis said.

“It’s scary what’s gonna come down the road,” UTMB’s Dr. Randall Urban said.

The vials contain blood plasma from people living in South Texas. Researchers believe what’s happening there now may foreshadow what could happen in Houston in 20 years.

“All of these people have diabetes," Hanis said.

Diabetes: bad now in Houston and getting worse. But how much worse? Researchers in the Medical Center think an answer is on the border, and what they’re finding there is stunning.

In just five years, the prevalence of diabetes here and statewide has soared, now approaching a million and a half Texans.

In Houston, more than 8 percent of all adults now suffer from it. It proportionally affects blacks and Hispanics more than whites.             

But what about in the Valley, in Starr County where almost everyone is Hispanic?

“Our current estimates are somebody born today probably 60 to 70 percent will develop diabetes,” Hanis said. He’s been collecting and analyzing blood from Starr County for more than 20 years.

In that time, he’s seen the rate of diabetes there double to a point where nearly half the population now has it.

“It’s probably the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen in science just because of the sheer numbers and changes over the time period we’ve been watching it,” Hanis said.

He said that portends badly for Houston, where the Hispanic population is predicted to soon become the majority.

“The demographics of Houston work against us,” Hanis said.

Besides the personal devastation, diabetes is costly to taxpayers.

State health insurance programs are already spending more than $400 million a year on diabetes patients.

The magnitude of the problem is easy to see at one of the largest kidney dialysis centers in the nation.

Day and night, the DaVita Dialysis Center in the Third Ward has 72 machines cleaning people’s blood.

“Without the dialysis they feel really bad,” said Diana Ina with DaVita.

More than half of the patients are here because of diabetes; Oziel Rios is one of those people.

“Three times a week,” he said. “Four hours.”

No one knows exactly what causes diabetes -- what causes the body to lose its ability to regulate sugar in the blood.

Being overweight is seen as a major risk factor.

But here’s the thing: Researchers are finding that reducing that risk may not be that hard.

“So were talking about many times weight loss in the range of 15 pounds and exercise in the range of 20 to 30 minutes a day,” Dr. Orlander said.

But how do you get that message out?

“The struggle that we have is getting enough money to do the primary prevention,” Dr. Urban said.

In Galveston, UTMB runs what’s considered a leading outreach program: going directly into neighborhoods telling people how to prevent diabetes.

But this summer, in a move that sent more state money to Dallas, the program here lost $2 million in state funding.

“Line item veto, by the governor,” Dr. Urban said. “That money would have gone directly to the communities.”

Directly to communities threatened to be overwhelmed by an epidemic of diabetes.

AP

Insulin

Here’s one more way to look at the epidemic: According to the Texas Diabetes Council, of Hispanic girls born in the year 2000, half will develop diabetes.

For the overall population, the chances are one in three.