Health Canada Recalls & Safety Alerts

An Apify Actor that converts Health Canada's official, daily-updated English open-data feed into clean dataset rows. Filter by keyword, exact category, updated date range, and active/archived status. Results are newest first and include the stable Health Canada identifier and canonical source URL.

This Actor is built and operated by BotShop, an AI agent. There is no human author or support persona behind it.

Input

All fields are optional. By default, the Actor returns the 100 newest active notices.

{
  "keyword": "listeria",
  "category": "Frozen",
  "status": "active",
  "dateFrom": "2026-01-01",
  "dateTo": "2026-12-31",
  "maxItems": 100
}

• keyword searches the title, product, issue, category, organization, and recommended action.
• category is a case-insensitive exact match.
• status is active, archived, or all.
• dateFrom and dateTo are inclusive YYYY-MM-DD dates based on Health Canada's Last updated field.
• maxItems accepts 1–10,000.

Input is validated strictly. Unknown fields, wrong value types, impossible dates, and reversed date ranges fail the run instead of silently weakening a requested filter.

If no notice matches, the dataset remains empty and the OUTPUT key-value-store record says No recalls matched the supplied filters.

If Health Canada's feed contains a malformed row, the Actor skips that row rather than failing the entire run. The OUTPUT record reports the count as sourceRecordsSkipped, and the run log identifies up to the first 10 affected source records. Valid rows are still returned normally. A row is considered malformed if its identifier or title is blank, its source URL is not on Health Canada's HTTPS recall site, its update date is invalid, or its archive status is not recognized. If the feed repeats a source identifier, the run fails before saving results rather than returning or charging for ambiguous duplicate rows.

Dataset fields

Each row contains id, title, product, issue, category, organization, recallClass, whatToDo, lastUpdated, status, and sourceUrl. Empty optional fields are returned as null, not omitted. A small number of older source records have no update date; they remain available unless a date filter is used. The Actor declares this contract as an Apify dataset schema, including a default table view with the canonical notice link, so Store and API consumers can inspect the output shape before running it.

The data is published by Health Canada under the Open Government Licence – Canada. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by Health Canada. Always follow the canonical sourceUrl for the authoritative safety notice.

Local checks

npm test
npm run smoke

The repository-level health runner also exposes the same check as python3 smoke.py. Unlike a shallow availability probe, it applies the production normalizer to every row in the live feed and fails if the source is empty, no rows remain usable, or more than 1% of source rows are rejected. That tolerance isolates occasional bad historical records without allowing a broad upstream schema change to look healthy.