CHEAP TESTING FOR A2 MILK
The A2 Corporation had an exclusive patent on the genetic test for the A2 trait, but the test was $25 per cow and they attached such strings to the test that few dairies would or could comply. Now GenomNZ is offering a $15 test and a company in Holland is offering one for about $75 US dollars. For a backyard cow either might be worth doing, but for a dairy even the cheaper test is too much for a trait that might never make them any more money. Dairies deal not so much with individual animals as with populations, and it is what dairies do that affects the human population who consume their products. So this is a moral issue, and it is to our benefit to encourage dairies to get their cows tested and try to steer their production away from the abnormal A1 protein. The first thing dairies need is access to a cheap test for A2 milk, and this is what I think electrodermal screening machines offer.
EAV/EDS machines have been around for 40 years and are widely used in Europe. In fact, many of them were designed by Americans who had them developed overseas since the FDA takes such a dim view of "radionics" devices. I have to wonder, if radionics devices are so useless, why retired NASA engineers seem to enjoy them so much. In the US they are pretty common, mostly used by naturopaths, health food stores, chiropractors, homeopaths, and other individuals in alternative health care. Mostly they are used for allergy testing in the USA. Once an allergy or group of allergies is found, the practitioner finds a homeopathic remedy on their shelf which is a highly dilute solution of the allergen, much like the allergy shots conventional doctors give. Since American conventional medicine hates these machines so much, I may as well run through their objections. First of all, food allergies are very difficult to detect by methods used by conventional doctors; scratch tests etc. These machines are pretty good at spotting food allergies and intolerances. Second, the old machines required a whole series of little vials of actual substances that were set on a metal test plate and the "vibrations" were sent via a wire to the hands of the person being tested. This elicits many indignant squeals from 20th century medicine, which has not caught on to 20th century physics, which discovered that everything is composed of energy and living things emit energy fields. Since complex substances are composed of matter that has certain vibrational characteristics, it should be as easy to identify the vibrations of things sitting in front of you as to study the mineral composition of distant stars, which physicists and astronomers claim they are doing. Perhaps we need to set "Quackwatch" on them for a change. The fancy newer machines have the vibrational characteristics of thousands of potential allergens stored in a computer, much as your home computer is able to store the vibrational characteristics not just of musical instruments but even of your favorite rock bands or opera singers. And just as we can recognize that our friend really really doesn't like opera or punk rock after a few notes, these machines can detect that someone really really doesn't get along with diary products. The user of these machines has the test subject hold a ground wire while the user touches a probe to various acupuncture points. Never mind that the Chinese have been using and improving acupuncture for the last 5,000+ years and that the meridians and points have been proved to exist by Western researchers, Quackwatch still doesn't believe in acupuncture. Can a billion Chinese really be that stupid? Suffice to say, having seen these machines in use several times, I was fully convinced when 3 operators told me their machines would have no trouble telling the difference between a "good" sample of milk from a "bad" sample, or even of an "extra bad" sample (presumably A1A1, a cow you really want to discard ASAP and not keep heifers from). I think the worst problem you'd get into would be if the cow had recently eaten something the testee was allergic to. If you want to run some of your favorites another time in case they turn up ok later or on another "allergic" person, it would at least help you to trust the test more.
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