By Dr. Sara Via and Betsy Nicholas, July 13, 2016, The Frederick News Post The recent discovery in an American patient of a “superbug” resistant to colistin, an antibiotic of last resort, is currently rocking the medical profession. This resistance gene has now been found in several U.S. communities just a few weeks after its discovery at the end of May at Walter Reed Army Medical Research Center. The rapid movement of this gene into new populations illustrates just how easily bacteria can share genes that are advantageous to them. Did you know that 70 percent of all medically important antibiotics used in the United States are given to farm animals that are not even sick? For decades, it has been common practice to administer low doses of the same antibiotics used in human medicine to livestock for growth promotion. Giving low doses to the entire herd on a regular basis is known to be the fastest way to produce bacterial populations that can resist antibiotics. This is why the European Union banned the prophylactic use of antibiotics in 2011. Despite the importance of this problem, a bill introduced in Maryland’s General Assembly this year to limit the use of medically important human antibiotics in farm animals did not even get a vote in either the House or the Senate. Sponsored by Sen. Paul Pinsky (D-Prince George’s) and Delegate Shane Robinson (D-Montgomery), this bill would have been a meaningful step in halting a practice that is known to endanger human health. After many years of warnings from health professionals about the dangers of this practice, the FDA released voluntary guidelines in 2015 for reducing the use of antibiotics in livestock. The FDA guidelines ban the use of antibiotics for growth promotion, but there is a major loophole — they allow…