Ampersand in HL7 message

[biztalk2006]

I have a client who is sending Ampersand in the HL7 Message and this is
causing the validation to fail and generate a negative acknowledgement. In
the HL7 configuration explorer, validation of the body segments is turned off.
MSH 2 has ^~\&
what can be done to rectify this situation?
They are not willing to replace ampersand in the message with other
characters.
what can be done in the party explorer?

[Tom Canter - Neudesic]

You have to write a custom pipeline component to replace the value
with the HL7 Escape character and then re-write convert it in the
output.

There is no way to turn off that validation.

Thanks,
Tom