This paper introduces an intuitive modeling approach for the analysis of broadcast route discovery mechanisms hi wireless ad hoc networks. The approach is based on concepts drawn from the field of epidemiology, and is proposed as a numerical means to model variants of the broadcast mechanisms for route discovery, particularly in large networks, e.g. with tens of thousands of nodes. This work is motivated by the observation that the rebroadcast probability of the query message in a route discovery is highly reminiscent of the retransmission probability of the disease in an epidemic. Using Matlab, a suitable epidemic model is adapted and applied to study a gossiping protocol, and to analyze the effectiveness of caching as a strategy for query flood containment in route discovery.