Consumers May Have the Last Laugh on Big Agriculture

A few days ago, the Senate voted 71-27 against an amendment to the Farm Bill that would have allowed individual states to decide whether or not to label foods as GMO.  So far, only VT and CT have voted to do so.  The fear is that Monsanto, empowered by the recent Supreme Court decision to allow them to do pretty much what they want to individual farmers that dared to defy the monopolistic company, will sue any state that would try to label genetically altered foods.  The Sanders Amendment would have given states the federal immunity to choose their own course of action.  I guess our senators don't want to allow the states any more autonomy than they already have, which, to some, isn't very much.

While this action, or inaction, may be somewhat depressing, don't despair; technology is coming to the rescue.  In the very near future, consumers will be able to run their own tests on foods for the presence of environmental toxins, GMOs, pesticides, food safety and more, using their hand held smartphones or other devices (which we know shouldn't be kept on by our bedsides at night).  Every single human being in this world, no matter where he/she lives, carries in their bodies about 700 contaminants including, pesticides, pthalates, benzenes, parabens, xylenes and many, many more carcinogenic substances.  These poisons affect our well being, health and fertility...all of which will affect our succeeding generations.  It it high time we try to rescue ourselves and our children and their children from this chemical nightmare that is being inflicted upon us all.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne researchers have developed a cradle and application that uses a phone's camera and built-in processing power as a biosensor to detect toxins, proteins, bacteria, viruses and other molecules.  Smart phones have very powerful computing capability and imaging.  The cradle created by the team contains a series of optical components, lenses and filters, normally found in much larger and more expensive laboratory devices.  A photonic crystal is at the heart of the biosensor.  It is like a mirror that only reflects one wavelength of light, allowing all other wavelengths to pass through without affecting the crystal.  When anything biological attaches to the crystal, such as proteins, pathogens, cells or DNA, the reflected color will shift from a shorter wavelength to a longer one.  The entire test takes only a few minutes.

The researchers are working on an iPhone cradle and hope to have one developed for the Android applications by next year.  It is relatively inexpensive, right now.  If this is mass produced, the cost will decrease even more.  Other such devices are also being developed.  One such device contains non-radioactive detection chemistry that is able to identify single-copy genes in transgenic plants, making them suitable for GMO detection.  If you'd like to read the entire article, this is the url:
http://preventdisease.com/news/13/052613_Consumers-Will-Soon-Have-Devices-In-Their-Hands-To-Detect-GMO-and-Toxic-Foods.shtml?utm_source=052613&utm

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