Therefore there remains a need to develop rigorous modern statistical approaches for parameter estimation of non-linear models for the 2001 FMD outbreak. Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques are the best established such methods and have been successfully employed in the analysis of a range of spatiotemporal outbreak data in the past [12] [13] [14] , as well as to purely temporal incidence data [15, 16] . Here we develop MCMC-based inference models for the 2001 FMD epidemic in GB. The models examine: the extent to which transmission was spatially localised and the temporal variation in transmission, species-specific variation in susceptibility, infectious-ness and heterogeneity in contact rates between and within species.