Quantitative epidemiology: progress and challenges.

This manuscript is derived from a presentation at the 2006 AVEPM--Schwabe Symposium which honoured the 2006 recipient of the Calvin Schwabe Award--Dr. S. Wayne Martin. Throughout his career, Dr. Martin was instrumental in furthering the development of quantitative epidemiology. This manuscript highlights some of the recent advances in quantitative methods used in veterinary epidemiology and identifies some of the challenges we still face in the use of these methods. Areas discussed are: methods for analyzing hierarchical data, Bayesian methods, survival analysis and integrating causal thinking and statistical analyses.