WDDX packet parse error when posting cfquery object

I am posting a hidden form attribute of a wddx encrypted cfquery object to my action page. The data includes ampersands '&'. I have verified that the data getting set to the form variable has the ampersand encoded as '&' but when passed to the next page the ampersand has already been decoded. There fore I get the following error message when calling <cfwddx> with an action="wddx2cfml": "WDDX packet parse error at line 1, column 1618. The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference.."

How can I make sure that the ampersand is encoded properly before deseriealizing by query object?

Thanks,

John