“Diabetesville, USA” paints a frightening picture about diabetes at the southernmost tip of Texas — so frightening that the film was the only documentary to be screened at the Scarlet Waters horror film festival in Austin last fall.
“They sent me a note saying it was the scariest film they'd seen, so they were including it, even though they never really do documentaries unless it's the making of a horror movie or something,” said filmmaker Michael Seringer, 39, who lives in San Antonio and shot parts of the film here.
The facts are undeniably bleak in Cameron County, an area in the Rio Grande Valley encompassing Brownsville and Harlingen: Nearly 30 percent of the population has diabetes, including a growing number of children. A majority of the population is overweight or obese. More than half have no medical insurance.
A glimpse into diabetes along the Texas/Mexico border is a glimpse into the future of the country, Seringer said. Experts predict a third of the population will have diabetes by 2050.
“Diabetesville, USA” is Seringer's first film. A self-described “data guy” who works in health care analytics and informatics, Seringer was working on a grant in the Rio Grande Valley when he began learning about the pervasiveness of Type 2 diabetes in Cameron County, where dialysis clinics and advertisements for diabetes supplies are everywhere.
“I was blown away by everything I saw,” he said, so he went in search of a book or film about the phenomenon. When he couldn't find anything, he decided to make his own film. He completed the feature-length documentary in 2011. It's on sale for $19.99 at www.diabetesthemovie.com.
Treating diabetes and its associated health problems in Cameron County is big business, Seringer said, but prevention efforts have been conspicuously absent.
The biggest culprit in the diet? The “massive amount of liquid calories” from soda, he said.
“We had footage of 2-year-olds with Big Red in the baby bottle,” he said.
Hector Ortiz Jr., an accountant in San Antonio, is one of the diabetes patients interviewed in the film. Since 2010, he has undergone dialysis because the disease damaged his kidneys. Because the treatment requires three sessions a week for about five hours at a time, he can't hold a full-time job.
Ortiz believes early education and prevention are paramount to curbing diabetes.
“If you begin the message at home and then you reinforce it in school, I think kids will get the message, and they'll take that with them the rest of their lives, and maybe their choices will be better than the ones that I have made,” Ortiz, 57, said.
Seringer, now vice president of technology at My Own Med, Inc., a health informatics start-up, thinks there's hope for Cameron County as health care experts continue to wave the red flag.