Microbiology question. Can someone please help :)?

Over 30 children younger than three years of age developed gastroenteritis after visiting a local water park. These cases represented 44% of the water visitors in this age group on the day in question. No older individuals were affected. The causitive agent was determined to be a member of the bacterial genus shigella. The disease resulted from oral transmittion to the children.

Based only on the information given can you
a)classify this outbreak as an epidemic?
b) Why or why not
c)If you were an epidemiologist, how would you go about determining which pools in the water park were contaminated?
d)What factors might account for the fact that no older children or adults develope diseases?
e) What step could the park operators take to reduce the chance of future outbreaks of gastroenteritis?

It sounds like you are fishing for some homework help here...so with a word of warning on plagerism, here we go:

a)yes, to an epidemioloigist, and epidemic is any occurance of disease above the expected level, this would clearly be an epidemic.

b)See above

c)If you were and epidemiologist, you would probably collect data from park goers about which pools they swam in and their age. A microbiologist would probably take a different angle and take water samples from the different pools.

d)Young children are more succeptable to infection because they have less humoral immunity since they have been exposed to less.

e)Closer monitoring of the water quality in their pools, especially when they have possible fecal contamination (perhaps closing pools when there is a possibility of fecal contamination) and maintaining bacteriacidal chlorine levels in their pools.

Not sure this is right but I'll go for it. First of all, not enough of a population is affected for an epidemic. I would go about determining which pools were affected by closing the park and testing all of the pools in the park for shigella. Obviously one pool was used more than another to come to the conclusion that only 44% were affected. The water park should routinely test its water and take proper precautions so that another outbreak does not occur.

Do your own homework. You don't learn anything if someone else does it for you. Google is a great tool.