Again, ELISA, when properly done, is 100% effective, and has never once, in the 30-ish years we've used it, failed to give an accurate analysis. This is considering the following: 1. We always enclose "blind" samples of known infected and known uninfected tissue -- blind to the lab -- and unless the results come back with them correctly identifying all of those, we would not believe their results on our unknowns. That assures that virus titer is in a usable range on the day the test was done. In actual fact, in all those years, they (WSU Prosser's ELISA lab) have NEVER gotten one wrong, even once. Pretty good record. 2. Once that's done and a rose is "certified" clean (notice that ELISA is just one of the tripod of tests we run -- they're also tested with 'Mme. Butterfly' and 'Shirofugen' cherry -- all 3 must come out unambiguously clean) -- no rose once certified in that way has EVER later been found to have rose mosaic. Not one. Not ever. Not even in cold climates where all the intelligent people live. On rare occasions, the lab has said a test was somewhat ambiguous, and in those cases, we ignored all of the results from that run, and re-ran them later. 3. While we use the three tests for redundancy, we've never seen a case in which one test came out positive while the others came out negative -- in 100% of the roses I've ever tested, all three methods have agreed on their result. So obviously, the point of this long, drawn-out discussion with all kinds of complaints, is moot -- there is no problem here. We have no problem at all identifying where the disease is. No evidence to the contrary has been presented here. I would like to say that you can't argue with absolute 100% success, but obviously, there is one person who is determined to argue continuously with absolute 100% success! So yes, I'm just working our way toward the 150 posts mark, and hoping to keep us focused on the real issues, rather than being constantly drawn into perfectly silly little side arguments that are in and of themselves without merit.

If you are interested and willing to search (Google or Bing), check out some of the articles on AGDIA, which is a company that makes tests for viruses and other diseases of plants. You can see the PCR and ELISA tests that are available for roses (and for many other plants.) Do you know the word "Synergy"? Not the new age version, but the science based synergy- there are some interesting plant pathology sites out there as well. Briefly, Synergy means that diseaseA has X symptoms and disease B has Y symptoms, but when a plant has diseases A&B, the plant will not have a simple mix of X and Y symptoms, but often will also have new (call them Z) symptoms that may be worse that the sum of X and Y. Where does that leave rose growers? It leaves rose growers wanting to keep their plants as healthy as possible so that no even more damaging symptoms appear. Years ago a simple study was done in California roses. Under optimum conditions, roses with a single virus (as tested for back then) produced ten to fifteen per cent fewer blooms. That, economically, was reason to keep the plants as clean as possible. And to the root to root transmission: Google Scholar papers by Giolino (author), roses, and the time period last ten years.

Mudlady, Chevy, Ford, foreign or domestic. When this issue comes up everyone has an opinion. Like Randy said, " If there was one best,everyone would be using it". For what it is worth, my new Vista system had Norton Symantec and it created all sorts of problems. As a result I uninstalled it and installed AVG. AVG works fine and I have not had one concern with it. Being free it makes the conversion even sweeter. Good Luck! Enjoy! DA

The attached link will take you to a recent PCmag.com competitive evaluation of AV products. PCmag (formerly PC Magazine) and in particular the author of this study are well known and have long-held reputations for being unbiased. Neil Rubenking's expertise has been recognized for 25 years or more. Flip through the article, you'll see they rate both free and for-sale systems. The Microsoft product gets consistently mediocre ratings in most comparison testing and evals. This author, as many others you'll find, suggests there are better choices. If you'd rather have a comprehensive security suite, here's another recent article Rubenking wrote. Note that the prices shown are probably MSRP, most of these can be purchased for substantially less money than what's shown. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369749,00.asp Here is a link that might be useful: Anti virus ratings