Basic Models for Disease Occurrence in Epidemiology

One of the epidemiologist's most basic tasks is estimation of disease occurrence. To perform this task, the epidemiologist frequently models variability in disease occurrence using one of three distributions--the binomial, the Poisson or the exponential distribution. Although epidemiologists often use them and their properties appear in standard texts, we know of no text or review that compares and contrasts epidemiological application of these distributions.