ITHACA, N.Y. -- Acute gastroenteritis -- commonly known as food poisoning -- is one of the most common household illnesses in the United States, with an estimated 76 million food-related illnesses occurring each year.

To learn more about preventing the spread of food-related illness pathogens on the farm, researchers at Cornell University are joining a new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)-funded Food Safety Research and Response Network (FSRRN), led by North Carolina State University. FSRRN is a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary team of more than 50 food safety experts from 18 colleges and universities who will investigate several of the most prevalent food-borne pathogens. It is funded by a $5 million grant from the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service.

"We will study pathogens, such as E. coli , Salmonella and Campylobacter , which are among the most important food-borne pathogens in the United States, to determine where they thrive in the environment, how they infect herds, how they can be detected and what can be done to reduce their presence in livestock and their risk to human health," says Yrjo Grohn, one of the co-principal investigators on the project. He is a professor of epidemiology and chairman of Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell. The research, he says will focus on preharvest food safety on farms.

The other Cornell researchers include Yung-Fu Chang, professor of population medicine and diagnostic sciences; Ynte Schukken, director, Quality Milk Promotion Services (QMPS), a research and service microbiology laboratory that handles some 200,000 samples annually, and professor of epidemiology and herd health; Lorin Warnick, associate professor of population medicine and diagnostic sciences; and Linda L. Garrison-Tikofsky, senior extension veterinarian at QMPS.