Outbreak Watch — WHO Disease Outbreak Alerts

Watch WHO's official Disease Outbreak News feed and get alerted the moment a new internationally-significant outbreak is published — Ebola, cholera, mpox, avian flu, and more. Run on a schedule; only outbreaks new since the last check are reported, never the full current list dumped as "alerts" on the very first run.

How it works

Consumes the free, no-auth public REST API of the World Health Organization (who.int/api/news/diseaseoutbreaknews) — the same official feed WHO itself publishes new Disease Outbreak News items to. Verified live before building: returns real current entries (e.g. the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Checked against Apify Store before building (08/08/2026): existing competitors in this space scrape WHO/CDC/ECDC/PAHO but do a one-time full dump each run — none do scheduled diff-based alerting (only what's new since the last check), which is the angle this actor covers.

Input

• Filter keywords (optional) — disease names, countries, or regions (e.g. Ebola, Democratic Republic of the Congo). Case-insensitive substring match against the outbreak title and summary. Leave empty to get every new outbreak, unfiltered.
• Request timeout.

Output

Built for someone who wants the numbers, not the article — one row per newly published outbreak matching your filter, with the figures pulled out of WHO's write-up for you: disease, location, total_cases, total_deaths, new_cases_since_last_report, new_deaths_since_last_report, matched_keyword, published, summary, url, checked_at. The day-over-day deltas (new_cases_since_last_report / new_deaths_since_last_report) are computed by comparing each new report for a disease against the last figures seen for that same disease — that's how you see the evolution over time, not just a single snapshot.

Known constraints

• WHO Disease Outbreak News covers outbreaks of international public health significance. Purely domestic events (e.g. a localized measles cluster with no cross-border spread) are typically not covered here — that's CDC/ECDC territory, out of scope for this version.
• total_cases/total_deaths are extracted from WHO's free-text write-up (regex, tuned and tested against 6 real reports across different diseases before shipping) — not every report is worded the same way. Single-case narratives and broad regional overviews (checked live: Nipah, Yellow Fever) often don't state one clean "X confirmed cases" figure, so these fields come back empty on those — the summary field is always filled in as a fallback either way.
• First-ever check establishes a silent baseline (no rows) rather than dumping every currently-active outbreak as if it just happened — alerts start from the second run onward. Day-over-day deltas also only start appearing once a disease has been seen at least twice.