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Bath Finishes Unforgettable Fall with Historic Championship Sweep
ALLENDALE, Mich. – The Bath High School sports community will never forget this fall’s girls golf team, which capped the program’s sixth season Saturday by winning its first MHSAA Finals championship.
And coach Chad Vietzke will remember the pivotal details. “That they go play golf all the time together, they love being together as a group, and just how close they are,” he said. “Last February, six of these girls met up in stocking caps, and there was snow, and they were hitting range balls at a heated area. And I knew then that we had something special.”
And this weekend, unstoppable.
The Bees carded a two-round 739 at The Meadows at Grand Valley State University, holding off runner-up Kalamazoo Christian as a 19-stroke first-day lead faded to only 14 by the end of the second round. Bath also celebrated sophomore Addilyn Duflo’s 14-stroke individual victory as she carded 152 strokes over 36 holes. Sophomore Hattie Lalonde tied for 10th individually at 183, while senior Sophia Perales tied for 25th and juniors Mya Vietzke and Brooke Kares rounded out the scoring, contributing one round apiece over the two days.
Bath’s girls golf team has reached the Finals all six seasons of its existence, with the Bees’ previous high finish fifth in 2023. They officially began making their move on this championship Oct. 7 when they claimed a Regional title for the first time. But they’d been building toward this weekend for much longer.
“We’ve grown so much. We were out there working in the winter, out there working in the summer. Every day it’s always drive, drive, drive,” Perales said. “We started (this season) great, and we just got better throughout the year. It just kept getting better and better.”
Duflo is doing the same after a magnificent high school debut. She finished second at the LPD4 Final last season as a freshman, and continued to surge this season. She was medalist at the Regional two weeks ago and entered Saturday’s final round with a nine-stroke lead.
She was the only golfer to break 80 on the weekend – doing so both rounds – and her first-round 73 and two-round score fell just outside the top 10 all-time in LPD4 Finals history.
“I didn’t really think about it, like I could do this sophomore year,” Duflo said. “Knowing last year what happened, it was like yeah, maybe I could do it. But I didn’t think it would be this year.”
Elk Rapids sophomore Piper Smith, Fowler senior Noelle Krepps and Byron junior Adalen Brown all tied for second in the individual standings, carding matching scores of 166.
MDHHS makes standing recommendation on respiratory virus vaccines
Continues COVID-19 vaccine standing recommendation
LANSING, Mich. – To help protect the health of Michigan families this cold and flu season, the state’s Chief Medical Executive Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian has issued a standing recommendation that the state’s health care providers should refer to the respiratory virus immunization recommendations compiled by the American Medical Association (AMA) when determining which vaccines their patients should receive and the timing for their administration.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services offers additional information about this guidance which applies to the 2026-2027 respiratory virus season:
“Vaccines against COVID‑19, RSV and influenza won’t prevent every illness this winter – there are many other respiratory viruses circulating – but each vaccine provides important protection against viruses known to cause serious disease,” said Bagdasarian. “While vaccination may not stop mild infections, it can significantly reduce the risk of emergency department visits, hospitalization and even death. I strongly recommend Michiganders stay up to date on vaccines. If you have questions about which vaccines are right for you, talk with your health care provider.”
The AMA’s recommendations are aligned with evidence and guidance from the American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Vaccine Integrity Project and Infectious Diseases Society of America.
In addition, Bagdasarian noted that the COVID-19 standing recommendation issued Sept. 19, 2025, remains in effect for the 2026-2027 COVID-19 vaccine.
The recommendation states, “Any person over the age of six months without contraindication who has not received a dose of a Food and Drug Administration-approved or -authorized 2025-2026 COVID-19 vaccine may be considered to have an underlying condition that puts them at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19 and is thus eligible to receive an age-appropriate dose.”
To learn more about COVID-19 and seasonal respiratory illnesses and how to protect yourself, visit Michigan.gov/COVIDFluRSV.
(courtesy story)
Research explores deer-targeted treatment to reduce ticks
By Kim Ward
EAST LANSING, Mich. -What if one way to reduce people’s risk of tick-borne disease began not with the tick, but with the deer it depends on?
Michigan State University researchers are building on years of wildlife disease research to explore how free-ranging white-tailed deer could safely receive an oral treatment capable of killing ticks or reducing their ability to reproduce, potentially disrupting a critical part of the tick life cycle.
The concept is somewhat like the flea-and-tick medications people give their dogs and cats. But safely and effectively delivering an oral treatment to wild deer across landscapes shared by wildlife and people is far more complicated. It’s a challenge MSU researchers Jean Tsao and Henry “Rique” Campa III have already spent years working to solve.
“Our goal is to find ways to protect people from tick-borne disease while also sustaining healthy wildlife and the ecosystems we all depend on,” said Tsao, a professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources with an appointment in MSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “This work gives us an opportunity to explore how we can reduce tick populations by targeting a wildlife host that is critical to the tick life cycle.”
Blacklegged ticks, which can transmit the bacterium that causes Lyme disease and several other diseases, depend on different wildlife hosts throughout their life cycle. Juvenile ticks often feed on small mammals such as mice, while adult blacklegged ticks commonly feed on white-tailed deer.
Deer do not give blacklegged ticks the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, but they play an important role in sustaining tick populations. After feeding on deer, adult female ticks drop off and can lay hundreds and even thousands of eggs. Interrupting that process could help reduce future generations of ticks.
“One possibility is an oral treatment that would work like the flea-and-tick medications people give their dogs and cats,” Tsao said. “The idea is to determine whether treating deer can block enough ticks from reproducing and thereby significantly reduce the tick population.” For MSU, the idea builds on earlier research that will complement the goals of newly announced federal funding.
Campa and collaborators from MSU and state and federal agencies previously developed and evaluated methods for orally delivering a vaccine against bovine tuberculosis to wild white-tailed deer in Michigan’s northeastern Lower Peninsula.
More recently, Tsao, Campa, post-doctoral scientist Matthew Buchholz and their collaborators have been applying that expertise to another challenge: developing a reliable way to deliver medication to deer in suburban landscapes, where people may encounter blacklegged ticks close to home.
The researchers have tested specially designed food-based delivery units that deer will eat, then used biomarkers to determine whether deer consumed them while they also monitored deer with trail cameras. The work examines not only whether treatment can reach deer, but how it could be distributed without creating unintended risks for deer or other wildlife.
“We’re not starting from scratch,” Campa said. “We’ve already worked with partners across Michigan to develop and test a system for delivering an oral bovine tuberculosis vaccine to wild white-tailed deer. Now, we can build on those relationships and that experience to ask whether a similar approach could eventually be used to reduce ticks and the diseases they spread.”
New federal funding announced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will allow the MSU team to plan the next phase of the research. MSU is a partner in the Midwest Center of Excellence for Vector-Borne Disease, which is headquartered at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and will conduct the center’s deer-targeted research under a new federal initiative studying wildlife-based approaches to tick control.
The immediate goal is not to begin distributing tick medication to deer. Instead, the funding will support development of a feasibility study to determine what would be required to safely test the approach in Michigan. That includes identifying ecological and regulatory questions, understanding public awareness and attitudes, determining what additional partnerships are needed and developing a research plan that could eventually be tested under real-world conditions.
“To conduct this kind of research responsibly requires much more than developing a treatment,” Campa said. “Wildlife managers, public health experts, regulatory agencies, researchers and the communities where the work could take place all have important roles. That collaboration has been critical to our previous work with deer, and it will be just as important here.”
The researchers hope the resulting framework could eventually help other scientists and wildlife managers adapt similar approaches elsewhere. The deer research is part of nearly a decade of MSU involvement with the Midwest Center of Excellence for Vector-Borne Disease, which brings together researchers and public health partners to develop and evaluate ways to prevent diseases transmitted by ticks and mosquitoes.
At MSU, that work also includes University Distinguished Professor Edward Walker of the Department of Entomology, who has studied insecticide-treated resting boxes designed to reduce populations of mosquitoes that can transmit eastern equine encephalitis, or EEE. MSU researchers also work with state and local public health agencies, help train health departments in vector surveillance, support mosquito-control programs and provide research opportunities for students and early-career scientists.
Together, the work reflects a One Health approach that recognizes the connections among human, animal and environmental health. More than half a million Americans are diagnosed with tick-borne diseases each year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and ticks continue to expand into new geographic areas.
Personal precautions such as using repellents, wearing protective clothing and checking for ticks remain important. But researchers also are looking for ways to reduce the number of ticks people encounter in the first place.
“If we can find a safe, practical way to target ticks through the wildlife hosts they depend on, we may be able to intervene much earlier in the cycle,” Tsao said. “The long-term goal is straightforward: fewer ticks, fewer opportunities for people and pets to encounter them and less risk of tick-borne disease.”
(courtesy story)