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Lyme disease is a tick-borne disease of increasing global public health interest. Clinical presentation is varied, posing challenges for case definition. Currently national incidence figures for the United Kingdom (UK) are derived from two-tier confirmatory laboratory diagnostic results. These figures have the potential to underestimate incidence as clinical cases managed without diagnostic investigation are unrecorded. This thesis aimed to identify and evaluate a variety of datasets for their ability to describe the incidence and sociodemographics of Lyme disease cases in the UK, and to assess whether they could be utilised in future national surveillance programmes. The datasets analysed were: Public Health England (PHE)'s Lyme disease diagnostic laboratory, PHE's laboratory surveillance system, hospital episode statistics data for England and Wales, an electronic health records database of primary care in the UK, Twitter, and the Small Animals Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET). A generalised Lyme disease population could be described from these data. This population had a bimodal age distribution, was predominately white, was from rural areas, and increasingly from areas with lower societal deprivation. Geographic distribution of cases could be described for England and Wales and showed the highest incidence of disease in southern central to south western England. These data showed an increasing incidence of Lyme disease. The relative incidence of Lyme disease cases varied between datasets, with the primary care data having the largest incidence of 4.42 per 100,000 person-years (95% CI 4.23-4.67). Multiplication factors were described between the three datasets of routinely collected health care data. The most important being a multiplication factor of 2.35 (95% CI 1.81-2.88) between laboratory-confirmed incidence and primary care incidence in England and Wales. The results from this thesis start to describe the epidemiological picture of Lyme disease in the UK; specifically identified as a research gap by the NICE guidelines. They will provide a platform for the many unanswered questions about the changing landscape of Lyme disease in the UK. It was concluded that a combination of health datasets could be used for future Lyme disease surveillance systems in the UK. Ideally this would include laboratory and primary care data. Until this is in place, the multiplication factor can be used to estimate the national incidence of Lyme disease and the potential burden it places on the National Health Service and the patients it afflicts.

On 2 July 2005, the Saturday before a summit of world leaders at Gleaneagles in Scotland, Live8 took place. Organised by Bob Geldof, the event brought together many high profile rock and pop performers to highlight the extreme famine conditions in Africa. Live8, however, was purportedly not in the business of promoting new albums, selling a range of merchandise or even raising charitable funds: indeed, tickets for the Live8 concerts were free. Rather, the event was intended to lead on to a rally in Edinburgh, forty miles from Gleneagles, calling on the summit attendees to cancel debt, double aid packages and remove trade barriers which hinder sustainable development on the African continent. As such, Live8 represents a strategic intent by rock and pop culture to ‘engineer’ a flow from the concert platform into the everyday. Conscious of the issues Live8 raises, this project looks at the different kinds of aesthetic event, from the contingent to the ‘pre-scripted’, which have over time become a feature of rock and pop culture. Through three distinctive case studies, whose subjects encompass both performers and their fan culture, concepts of narrative, spectacle and performance are discussed in order to understand, from a dramaturgical perspective, how rock and pop culture deals with representational schisms, particularly where the social world is implicated, and the role an aesthetic event (often a rock or pop concert) plays in the course of redress. Eschewing the limitations of musicology and media studies, which have often beset earlier investigations into rock and pop culture, this project’s overarching objective is to offer innovative thinking about the evolving state of the relationship it can, and does, facilitate between the ‘staged’ and the everyday.