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The field of public health is replete with mathematical models and numerical targets. In the case of disease eliminations, modelled projections and targets play a key role in evidencing elimination futures and in shaping actions in relation to these. Drawing on ideas within science and technology studies, we take hepatitis C elimination as a case for reflecting on how to think with mathematical models and numerical targets as 'performative actors' in evidence-making. We focus specifically on the emergence of 'treatment-as-prevention' as a means to trace the social and material effects that models and targets make, including beyond science. We also focus on how enumerations are made locally in their methods and events of production. We trace the work that models and targets do in relation to three analytical themes: governing; affecting; and enacting. This allows us to situate models and targets as technologies of governance in the constitution of health, which affect and are affected by their material relations, including in relation to matters-of-concern which extend beyond calculus. By emphasising models and targets as enactments, we draw attention to how these devices give life to new enumerated entities, which detach from their calculative origins and take flight in new ways. We make this analysis for two reasons: first, as a call to bring the social and enumeration sciences closer together to speculate on how we might think with models and targets differently and more carefully; and second, to encourage an approach to science which treats evidencing-making interventions, such as models and targets, as performative and political.

Increasing attention has been paid to matters of ontology, and its accompanying politics, in the drug policy field. In this commentary, we consider what an 'ontological politics' might mean for how we think about what drug policy is and what it might become, as well as for how we think about (and do) research in drug policy. Thinking ontopolitically questions the tacitly accepted status of 'drug problems', calls into question the realist presumptions which underpin much drug policy analysis, and provokes thinking about what counts as 'evidence' and the 'evidence-based policy' paradigm itself. We call attention to the inventive possibilities of method when grappling with the challenges thrown forth by the ontological turn, with a renewed focus on practice and relations. An ontological politics disrupts consensual claims and draws critical attention to objects that might otherwise appear 'finished' or 'ready-made', not least the things we call 'drugs' and 'drug policy'. Working with 'drug policy multiples' invites new thinking and dialogue to provoke an ethico-political mode of intervention in the field of drug policy and drugs research.

Informed by work on futurity in science and technology studies, we trace how global disease elimination targets perform a world without disease through their translations in visual advocacy campaigns. Treating disease elimination targets and their visualisations as performative, we take the case of hepatitis C elimination to interrogate how futuring practices in public health govern the present and make effects. We focus specifically on how World Health Organization targets in the Global Health Sector Strategy on Viral Hepatitis entangle with visual resources produced by the World Hepatitis Alliance NOhep advocacy campaign. Targets and their visual representations in campaigns perform a disease elimination future which is set apart from the present, and yet urges action in-the-now. It enacts global health citizens but separates them from localised experiences of living with, and being cured of, disease. This disease elimination future relies heavily on instrumental rationalities and logics of the present, including the privileging of biomedical technoscientific knowledge, implementation science and global health governance, to the exclusion of other matters of concern, flattening out complexity to perform its certain achievability. These enactments raise political questions about how disease elimination futures might be made in a different mode.

Social changes arising from political transition may have contributed to the spread of HIV. Successful prevention strategies require change to the risk environment as well as individual behaviour

Since 1986 we have witnessed a succession of mass media campaigns that have aimed to provide information about HIV infection and AIDS. From the now notorious Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) iceberg and tombstone motifs designed to imprint the word 'AIDS' on the 'general public' consciousness, to the Health Education Authority's (HEA's) attempts to address the 'realities' of heterosexual sexual behaviour, the campaigns have been widely criticised both for their reliance upon fear tactics and for not meeting their ostensible aims of changing behaviour. In this paper we will propose that not only is this due to inherent contradictions in the use of the advertising media for the purposes of health education, but also that the real impetus of the campaigns has not been educational at all.

Central government grants finance over sixty per cent of local authority expenditure and one grant in particular, the Rate Support Grant, finances over fifty per cent. Hence the annual distribution of the Rate Support Grant attracts considerable attention on the part of local authorities. However, the trend in shares of grant since local government reorganization, which has increasingly favoured London and the Metropolitan areas at the expense of the shire counties, has provoked considerable controversy. This paper reviews past and present methods used to distribute the Rate Support Grant in the light of this trend and provides, in particular, a critique of the present method with proposals for remedial action. Whilst the statistical aberrations described could be easily remedied, the dispute over the equity of the resulting distribution of the Rate Support Grant will remain unresolved until politicians provide more explicit guidance on the principles upon which the expenditure needs of local authorities are to be assessed.

This paper reflects on the use of objects in qualitative interview methods. We consider the use of objects in "single" research events and in longitudinal designs. This leads us to consider how using objects in interviews situates in relation to time. Emphasizing the materiality of objects as well as how objects help to materialize events, experiences, and accounts, we explore what objects do and how we can practically work with objects, especially in qualitative longitudinal research. Objects in interviews do not simply afford representations or elicitations of participant stories, but become dynamic actors that enable interviews to speak materially. Using vignettes from a longitudinal study investigating experiences of COVID-19 in time, we hone our attention towards the temporal affordances of object methods. We conclude with a list of practical suggestions for using objects in qualitative longitudinal research.

Background:In public health emergencies, evidence, intervention, decisions and translation proceed simultaneously, in greatly compressed timeframes, with knowledge and advice constantly in flux. Idealised approaches to evidence-based policy and practice are ill equipped to deal with the uncertainties arising in evolving situations of need.
Key points for discussion:There is much to learn from rapid assessment and outbreak science approaches. These emphasise methodological pluralism, adaptive knowledge generation, intervention pragmatism, and an understanding of health and intervention as situated in their practices of implementation. The unprecedented challenges of novel viral outbreaks like COVID-19 do not simply require us to speed up existing evidence-based approaches, but necessitate new ways of thinking about how a more emergent and adaptive evidence-making might be done. The COVID-19 pandemic requires us to appraise critically what constitutes 'evidence-enough' for iterative rapid decisions in-the-now. There are important lessons for how evidence and intervention co-emerge in social practices, and for how evidence-making and intervening proceeds through dialogue incorporating multiple forms of evidence and expertise.
Conclusions and implications:Rather than treating adaptive evidence-making and decision making as a break from the routine, we argue that this should be a defining feature of an 'evidence-making intervention' approach to health.